Re: [Chicken-users] Egg <-> Chicken version compatibility

[Peter Bex]

On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 02:08:01PM +0100, Alaric Snell-Pym wrote:
> Looks like the message-digest egg passes
> - -no-procedure-checks-for-toplevel-bindings to csc, which this old
> version of it doesn't like.
> 
> Now, there's several easy fixes to that (I'm compiling a more recent
> chicken from git as we speak), but it's a bad precedent IMHO that people
> might install chicken from their system package manager and then find
> they can't run Chicken apps. I'd like to be able to confidently say
> "Wanna use Ugarit? Install chicken then type 'chicken-setup -s ugarit'
> and you're away!" rather than expect people to install from source or
> from funny packages.

Agreed.

> In this case, I think that optimisation flags should all be ignored by
> csc if it doesn't understand them.

In principle that's a good suggestion. I'd like to add that it's probably
good to emit a warning, so people get notified of typos instead of
scratching their heads to try to understand why their flag didn't have an
effect.

But the real reason it went wrong in this particular case is that people
should NOT be using these hyper-specific flags for compiling eggs
intended for public consumption unless there's a really good reason to
do so.

It's just an optimization flag, and I think if people need to squeeze
every last drop of performance for an egg it's probably better to expect
them to pass this option when compiling the egg through CSC_OPTIONS.

I think egg authors should be cautious and generally only use the
switches -O1, -O2 etc (that's O the letter, not the number :P)
by default.

Cheers,
Peter
-- 
http://sjamaan.ath.cx
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