Re: [Axiom-developer] CCL maintenance.

[Stephen Wilson]

Gabriel Dos Reis <address@hidden> writes:
> The slowness of GCL is another irritating aspect of working on current
> Axiom code base.
> 
> Please, don't tell me you're not concerned about wasting developer's time.

Oh no. Though GCL may not be super-duper-fast when it comes to compile
times, there are may opportunities for speeding up the build which at
the same time have other benefits.  For example, eliminating dead
code.  I looked at the email archives w.r.t saturn and the majority of
the posts were discussing how to remove the connection to the system so
that a windows build was possible.  Though not dead strictly speaking,
Im looking at removing the nag fortran library support, which appears
quite straight forward to do.  

Im sure you could aticipate this, but I suspect that getting Boot out
of the picture and eliminating (understand, this is just my
perspective) a significant layer of indirection would _significantly_
reduce compile times.  I would not be surprised if a lisp rewrite saw
the SPAD compiler build time drop to 15-20 minutes (I think this is a
conservative estimate).  If done properly, the algebra build could
drop significantly as well.

In short, I dont blame GCL for axioms long build times.


Sincerely,
Steve