From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Richard Stallman Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: Preview: portable dumper Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2016 11:55:16 -0500 Message-ID: References: <047a67ec-9e29-7e4e-0fb0-24c3e59b5886@dancol.org> <83zikjxt1j.fsf@gnu.org> Reply-To: rms@gnu.org NNTP-Posting-Host: blaine.gmane.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=Utf-8 X-Trace: blaine.gmane.org 1480438568 25779 195.159.176.226 (29 Nov 2016 16:56:08 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@blaine.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2016 16:56:08 +0000 (UTC) Cc: dancol@dancol.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org To: Eli Zaretskii Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Tue Nov 29 17:56:04 2016 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([208.118.235.17]) by blaine.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.84_2) (envelope-from ) id 1cBlhK-0005hT-5Q for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Tue, 29 Nov 2016 17:56:02 +0100 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:38115 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1cBlhO-0005ai-0K for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Tue, 29 Nov 2016 11:56:06 -0500 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:33725) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1cBlgm-0005aQ-11 for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Tue, 29 Nov 2016 11:55:31 -0500 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1cBlgl-0002O1-Bb for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Tue, 29 Nov 2016 11:55:28 -0500 Original-Received: from fencepost.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::e]:36646) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1cBlga-0002IJ-Po; Tue, 29 Nov 2016 11:55:16 -0500 Original-Received: from rms by fencepost.gnu.org with local (Exim 4.82) (envelope-from ) id 1cBlga-0006Ni-7k; Tue, 29 Nov 2016 11:55:16 -0500 In-reply-to: <83zikjxt1j.fsf@gnu.org> (message from Eli Zaretskii on Mon, 28 Nov 2016 22:12:40 +0200) X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: GNU/Linux 2.2.x-3.x [generic] X-Received-From: 2001:4830:134:3::e X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.21 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: "Emacs-devel" Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:209734 Archived-At: [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] > Thanks for your efforts, but I think this is a wrong direction, that > will eventually get us into the same problem we have with unexec: the > need to know and depend on intimate details of relocations, memory > allocation, etc. Maintaining the portable dumper will be far simpler than maintaining unexec. Unexec has to write a file in whatever format the system uses for executables. If that is ELF format, it is very complicated, and it wasn't designed for this purpose. It is necessary to copy the material from the temacs executable, and modify it along the way. All those problems will be absent for the portable dumper, which will make its maintenance much easier. On top of that, adding Lisp objects will now require > writing its dumper back-end, so this will be a constant maintenance > burden of the kind that only a few of us can bear. Yes, but how often do we make such changes? Once every few years, I think. And it won't be a big difficulty to do so, if the code of the dumper is clean. I am sure it will be a lot cleaner than the code of unexec. > Making the initial load of preloaded Lisp files (most probably, a > single large file) fast enough to allow us to dump the dumping phase > altogether is a much more perspective direction. I think this has its own difficulty -- the need to represent everything in Lisp syntax. I don't know a priori which one will be cleaner. It would be good to implement this alternative so we can compare them for real rather than just in our imaginations. -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org) Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org) Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.