Re: MCL and Apps

[neves@neves.ils.nwu.edu (David Neves)]

In article <geek-2012941149090001@gray.covis.nwu.edu>, geek@nwu.edu (Joey
Gray) wrote:

> in our
> application user's never see fred windows or listeners - we hope ;-). the
> interpreter/compiler is stripped out of our application because of the
> funky licensing agreements.
I believe that the :excise-compiler option merely disables the compiler. 
It doesn't actually remove the code from the executable.

> i guess i just objected to the claim that MCL applications were small
> compared to other macintosh applications.
No, Anderson said:
"i am impressed at how small MCL is compared to other current Lisps"

There are certainly ways to make a MCL image smaller (i.e. tree shakers)
but I don't know if that is a priority item for Digitool.  Certainly this
is only an issue for medium sized applications (a meg or two).  If you
have a 15 meg MCL application then nothing Digitool could do to MCL is
going to make that much smaller.  You have to work on that yourself --
just like you would if it were written in C. 

There are ways of chopping off a few hundred K in big applications by
gettting rid of lambda list info, source file info, documentation strings,
and so on.  You usually have to set the right environment variables when
loading in your code.  However if you know in which hash tables this
information is kept you can zero them out after the fact.  Perhaps this
should be documented somewhere.

-David