[Openmcl-devel] smaller images

[Gary Byers]

If you wanted to run OpenMCL on a memory-constrained PPC-powered wristwatch
(maybe "cellphone" or "PDA" is more plausible), you could lop off something
more than 1MB by building an image without local symbol information,
doc strings, and source file information.

In most cases, it's a better investment of everyone's time to go to
the corner drugstore and get more memory for your wristwatch/PDA/digital
camera/cellphone/whatever.

OpenMCL came out of an effort to develop a lisp for memory-constrained
embedded systems (and MCL was developed on and for systems with
substantially less memory than your average cellphone/camera/wristwatch
has today.)  I think that that history shows, and that (consciously or
otherwise) it tends towards being overly conservative in terms of 
memory footprint and usage (even though the released image has grown
by a few MB over the last few years.)

If you're aware of specific ways in which ~6.5MB is "big" - unreasonably
or wastefully big - I'd be somewhat curious as to what those ways are.
If it's just some sort of general impression that "6.5MB is big", I'm
a little sympathetic: I occasionally get nostalgic for the days when
that sort of statement didn't usually have to be qualified.  (Then
I remember disco music and the nostalgia quickly fades ...)




On Fri, 10 Mar 2006, Gary King wrote:

> Mostly out of curiosity, how small can an OpenMCL image be while
> still containing "all of Lisp"? The image I built myself back on 10
> Feb 2006 is 6.4-MB, which seems big (but what do I know?!).
>
> thanks,
> -- 
> Gary Warren King
> metabang.com
> http://www.metabang.com/
>
>
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