🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <8457@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM> toma@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM (Tom Almy) writes:

   In article <JSP.90Nov19154628@glia.biostr.washington.edu> jsp@glia.biostr.washington.edu (Jeff Prothero) writes:

>>What's the point of image save/restore?  Should saved images be
>>portable between machines or versions?

>Saved images are not portable between machines because these are binary
>files and the representations can change (big vs little endian, wordsize, etc).
>They are also not portable if funtab changes.

Yeah... notice, my question was *should* saved images be portable.
Do people save images only for an afternoon, or do they habitually
archive them and come back a year later...?

>>Would it be hard/pointless to write code to convert the xlisp
>>state into initialized C header files, so that the xlisp state
>>could be portably compiled into an application?

>The state is mainly a large initialized linked list which can not be
>statically declared in C (you need to execute code to set the links).

Is this obviously true?  You can initialize an array of pointers to
functions in C.  (Remember funtab[]? :-) As far as I know, you can
initialize pointers to anything in C.  Is it nonportable in practice
to initialize an array of pointers with the pointers pointing various
places into the array...?  I don't think my compiler would have any
problems with this...

>IMHO it would also be pointless since applications should be distributed
>as xlisp source rather than C files (what if the user doesn't have a C
>compiler?).

I'm sensitive to this.  But loading a lot of source text in can slow
things down.  Loading an imagefile is one way to speed things up.
Having the lisp image precompiled in would be another...

>Tom Almy
>toma@tekgvs.labs.tek.com
>Standard Disclaimers Apply
--
jsp@glia.biostr.washington.edu (Jeff Prothero)
jsp@u.washington.edu (If above bounces.)
Biological Structure Graphics Lab, U Washington