Re: reducing lisp programs' size

[dlamkins@teleport.com (David B. Lamkins)]

In article <199503221018.AA24492@arnold.cast.uni-linz.ac.at>, "rudolf
mittelmann"  <rm@cast.uni-linz.ac.at> wrote:

> In message <ddyerD5Jnzr.5E8@netcom.com>  writes:
> ..
> > 
> > Treeshaking has real effect, but risks introducing bugs, has little
> > effect on performance, and marginal effect on size.
> > 
> ..
> Marginal? It depends...
> 
> From 1989 to 1992 there was an interesting Common Lisp for the
> Macintosh from UK-based Procyon Research. (It was the first
> commercial CLOS implementation.)
> When making standalone applications, it was possible to reduce
> the progs size from 3.5 MB to 800KB (without CLOS) or 1.2MB
> with CLOS. However, the more of Lisp you used in your prog,
> the less savings were possible: Big portions were
> the reader, the format package, and some others.

I've recently started working with ALC/Windows from Franz.  This seems to
be derived from Procyon's system. (The source to the interface builder, at
least, has Procyon's copyright.  I thought I saw other hints as well, but
can't remember what they are.)

If this is (was) Procyon Common Lisp, it doesn't really have a tree shaker
-- you have to *manually* (yes, by trial and error) specify which packages
to eliminate from the image for a standalone application.  The salesperson
I talked to at Franz said that a lot of their customers "had difficulties
using the application generator."  I have yet to deal with it for a
production release, but I don't relish the thought of having to figure out
all of the dependencies by myself.  *That* is what a tree shaker is
supposed to do.


Dave
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