Re: Preview: portable dumper

[Stefan Monnier]

> I've been working on a portable dumper for GNU Emacs. The attached patch is
> an early version of this work.

Cool!

> An additional optimization follows, although this part isn't implemented
> yet: we can define a "preferred load address" for the dump and write
> relocation information such that if the dump and Emacs end up being where we
> expect them to be, we don't have to perform any relocations at all.

Oh, so the in-file format is also a valid in-memory format?  Great.
AFAIK, that's the crucial difference between a "fast .elc loader" and
your approach.  This should be key to get really good performance
(e.g. good enough that it doesn't slow down bootstrap noticeably).

> would benefit from compression, which will reduce IO loads: LZ4 reduces the
> dump size for me from ~12MB to ~4MB. As in the mmap case, we can throw away

Hmm... interesting the "dump one big .elc" approach I played with (which
kinda works right now, tho with the known performance issues) leads to
a dumped.elc file of a size a bit below 4MB (which gzip compresses down
to ~1MB).

I assume your system is using 64bit Lisp_Object, right?  So on a 32bit
Lisp_Object your dump size is probably closer to 6-7MB.

> functions pdumper.h --- but even so, it's within 100ms or so of an
> unexeced Emacs.

0.1s will still lead to a noticeable slow down of bootstrap, but at
least it should be good enough for the usual end-user who doesn't run
Emacs in batch mode.

> It's also possible to dump an already-dumped Emacs, so it should be possible
> for users to have their own dump files.

[ FWIW in theory my dumped.elc approach could also work on an
  already-dumped Emacs, for use by end-users (it basically just prints the
  contents of the obarray), tho it would indeed need extra work to weed out
  problems printing objects like markers and such.  ]


        Stefan