On Wed, Jul 07, 2021 at 10:12:05AM -0700, [email protected] wrote:
> On a newish x86_64 machine without no-pie running Ubuntu 20.04, everything
> goes smoothly.
You mean configure printed:
Testing if compiler recognizes -no-pie no
That would be stange. Anyway, thanks for testing.
> The main difference that your setup makes to me as end user is having to
> type "poplog pop11" (or ved, or xved or whatever) instead of just "pop11".
> Of course I can set up aliases or links for myself, but I imagine that you
> have reasons for doing it this way.
Well, if we want this as install for many users then we need to
look for conflicts. Currently there is Lisp implementation
called 'clisp', trying to hijack this name may meet fierce
resistance from 'clisp' users. I am not sure about 'prolog',
but I suspect that in Debian it is used to point to user
prefferred Prolog system, which may be different from Poplog.
So some diplomacy may be useful here. 'pop11' and 'xved'
are probably safe (only used for Poplog).
> As far as I can see, using the poplog
> script means setting up a fresh poplog environment for every pop11 call,
> rather than the old way of setting up the environment once at each login.
Yes. This avoid many probles (mentioned by Stephen Leach).
> On a modern machine, I suppose the time taken in defining the poplog
> variables is negligible and maybe there is something to be gained by not
> cluttering up the environment between poplog calls.
Performance issues are somewhat tricky here. You may be surprized
how expensive is program startup on modern Linux. Manipulations
on environment should be very small part of this, unless
environment is very large. The way I did this, namely by using
a wrapper script is rather expensive: we pay startup costs
twice, once for shell and second time for Poplog. This may
be reduced by using appropriate C program. Small statically
linked C program should be able to start up 50-100 times faster
than largish dynamically linked program like shell or Poplog.
There is also possiblity of doing equivalent work in Poplog
itself. But ATM I want something that works well, if
startup time matters there is room for improvement.
Let me add that cases where startup time may matter are
exactly cases where you do not want to depend on envirinment.
Namely startup matters for small utility programs that
are run from other programs (which may be unaware of
fact that utility is written in Poplog).
--
Waldek Hebisch
