Ideas to reduce MCL Size

[lau@darpa.mil]

As a developer of commercial MCL<->Database applications, I have found 
the reliablity of MCL the major plus,  its size both in memory and disk
the major detraction.  Out on the PC world Smalltalk has made major 
inroads, and I hope MCL eventually does this in the Mac world.  This
is my feedback on the proposed ideas:

>>>1) A tree shaker to automagically remove parts of MCL that are
>>>   not used by your application.

This would be nice if it were reliable.  If a function were called 
unexpectedly,  there should be some library of excerpts where it could be 
found and loaded.

>>>2) Make the development environment be optional, or distribute 2
>>>   MCL applications: with & without development environment. Maybe
>>>   even a third application that has just Common Lisp with no
>>>   application framework.

Of course the applications I deliver do not need the development 
environment.  But how much room this would save?

>>>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.

This is my favorite,  since it would allow lots of MCL applications to run 
concurrently,  just as lots of C applications can run concurrently.  It 
would also simplify installation of applications,  since no archiving would 
be involved.  Hopefully it would also shorten the application boot time at 
the expense of MacOS boot time.

Thank you for the opportunity to send in feedback,

Lawrence Au
DARPA Subcontractor