Re: Preview: portable dumper

[Stefan Monnier]

> Granted, the proposed dumper is not very complicated.  But it isn't
> trivial either.  So if we can achieve a similar effect by using the
> "normal" loadup code, which is much simpler and doesn't really require
> understanding anything new, I think it's more beneficial for the
> project's future.

Ken worked on speeding up the lread.c code, and it got to be
significantly faster, but not fast enough.  AFAIK it's got to the point
where it's not clear exactly how to speed it up further.  Not that it
can't be done, but that it's not obvious how, so it's likely going to
require some serious rethinking and maybe restructuring/rewrite of
the code.

Is it going to happen if we don't merge the pdumper?  I'm not so sure.

The main impetus behind speeding up lread.c is to replace unexec.c, so
I agree with you that merging the pdumper might mean that speeding up
lread.c will simply never happen.  But I think there's also a very
serious risk that even without the pdumper, speeding up lread.c will
still never happen: I have no intention on working at speeding up
lread.c, AFAICT Ken also gave up on it, anyone else?

Personally, I think that maybe we should move in the other direction:
keep lread.c for "source code" and generalize the pdumper code so it can
also be used for the .elc files.


        Stefan