At 12:02 PM 8/29/00 -0600, Tom Christiansen wrote:
> >Well then. It is impossible to rearchitect it to make it shared
> >text? Perhaps the first instance of perl sets up some vast shared
> >memory segments and a way for the newcomers to link in to it and look
> >at the modules that have been loaded, somewhere on this system, and use
> >the common copy?
>
>I'd be astonished to see a general-purpose, cross-platform, and
>maintainable solution to this problem. I predict that you'd at the
>very best, only address this a few places. Feel free to astonish me.
It's possible we'll manage this with mmap()ing predigested bytecode, but
I'm not entirely sure that's feasable--it means the optree (or whatever)
that perl runs through would have to have no pointers at all in it, and
that might be a rather big speed hit. (Presumably branches would need to do
relative lookups and such)
On the other hand, if we go the TIL route (which has its own cross-platform
headaches) we could precompile segments of code into something that would
be shareable as it'd be real executable code.
> >This handwringing naysaying is depressing.
>
>Very well, then: I'll save it for an after-the-fact I-TOLD-YOU-SO,
>which, believe it or not, is truly *not* a pleasant thing to be
>able to say.
Personally I'd rather have someone throwing wet blankets now, rather than
later. If the ideas have merit enough to be worth doing then they'll
survive the uncomfortable scrutiny. If they don't, better to get the ego
bruising out of the way now, rather than after spending a month or more of
wasted time.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
