Tim, On Tuesday, March 21, 2006 11:00 AM you wrote: > ... > AXIOMsys has a large set of libraries. These libraries > can't be compiled and executed standalone because they > assume the underlying lisp (grep for $Lisp in the algebra > sources). >
Very true. > There have been numerous attempts by many people to create > a standalone version of the AXIOMsys library. All have > failed because the libraries assume lisp. I suppose you > could figure out a way to link GUILE into the aldor > libraries and succeed thru that path. I cannot see any clear reason to prefer GUILE or even Scheme over Lisp or even FOAM (the Aldor abstract machine). Also it seems rather "narrow minded" to think that "standalone" necessarily means the same thing as "without lisp"... ;) > > The dream was to have a standalone version of the axiom > compiler rather than an embedded version. I didn't believe > this was useful then and I still don't believe it is useful > now. That's like saying that "stand alone" Fortran doesn't make sense without the IBM 360 or that "C" is of no value without Unix. That is clearly incorrect. As leading-edge compilers, both SPAD and Aldor represent a great deal of value on their own - whether they are used to write Axiom library code or not. > A more effective path would be to load and compile your > computation in lisp and then generate a standalone image to > do that computation, sort of a special version of AXIOMsys. > This IS standalone, machine-language code with an embedded > lisp that can use all of the axiom library. Yes, I agree completely. That is the right way to go. What would you suggest might be the minimal GCL environment required to run most of the Axiom library code? Assuming that we do not want to keep any of the Axiom interpreter but just the minimum support for SPAD and/or the Aldor interface, would it be a good idea to start with BOOTSYS or something earlier in the bootstrap cycle? How much work would it be to determine exactly what modules are required? And realistically, how much memory are we likely to save in the resulting "standalone" executable but dropping all the stuff that we don't need? Regards, Bill Page. _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
