Re: compiling guix is too slow?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Leo Famulari <address@hidden> skribis:

> My understanding is that Guile 2.2 traded slower compilation for faster
> execution of compiled programs. Hopefully the performance of the
> compiler will be improved in later updates to Guile.

Yes, that’s a good summary.

Most of the code we compile is package definitions that don’t benefit
from all the fancy optimizations, so build-aux/build-self.scm (run by
‘guix pull’) turns those off.

Unfortunately even with this change compilation is slower than with
Guile 2.0, and IMO unacceptably slow for ‘guix pull’ (it takes only a
few minutes at most on my laptop, but that’s a lot if we compare to
‘apt-get update’.)

Andy, do you have other approaches in mind that we could explore to
improve on this?  Evaluating all of gnu/packages instead of compiling it
AOT would probably be bad for memory and CPU consumption.

Thanks,
Ludo’.