Re: MCL support for MOP

[thomas@gmd.de (Tom Gordon, I3.KI 2665)]

In article AA28536@cambridge.apple.com, bill@cambridge.apple.com (Bill St. Clair) writes:
...
> We'll probably be
> looking into a few ways to reduce the size of MCL (though probably
> not for 2.1). Some ideas are:
...
> 3) One or more shared libraries for the different pieces of MCL.
>    This will allow small MCL applications at the expense of some
>    large inits.
 
Are shared libraries supported by the Mac OS?  

The WCL implementation of Common Lisp on Sparcs uses shared libaries
very effectively, and my feeling is that this approach adequately
solves the problem of not being able to decide what parts of the Common
Lisp language and development environment are required by the
application:   Just deliver the whole system as a shared library and
let anything required be loaded on demand.

The only disadvantage I'm aware of is the the library takes up space on 
secondary storage, but this is not often a practical problem today.

---
Thomas F. Gordon
GMD, FIT; Artificial Intelligence Research Division
5205 Sankt Augustin 1 / Germany
email: thomas.gordon@gmd.de;  phone: (+49 2241) 14-2665