Re: Time to drop the pre-dump phase in the build?

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org> writes:

> On 01/10/2014 11:15 AM, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
>
>> (4) We're presently buying some startup speed at the cost of a larger
>>      minimum working set.
>
> The minimum working set is zero. Modern operating systems demand-page
> necessary information.

That's a popular misconception.  The key point to note is "page" in
demand-paging.  Unless one uses a garbage collection and topological
sort and compaction of the memory, most of the stuff that will get paged
in along with required data will not get accessed because it is
unrelated.  Now a temacs dump has not seen much action with regard to
fragmentation, but still the normal Lisp programming styles allocate and
release enough transient memory that the image will be mixed up quite
more than byte-compiled files will be.  Of course, if the byte-compiled
files are small, you'll get into block waste as well.

-- 
David Kastrup