guile on lemote (was Re: Reconsideration of MinGW work)

[Ken Raeburn <raeburn@raeburn.org>]

On Mar 22, 2010, at 20:04, Neil Jerram wrote:
>> Having just bought a Lemote Yeelong notebook at LibrePlanet [...]
> 
> Aside: I was wondering about buying one of those too, but haven't yet
> because of performance concerns.  Can it compile Guile successfully, and
> if so how long does it take?

It appears that released versions of Guile are packaged for the machine already.

I checked out the current git source to build; configuring took 3.5 minutes just to remind me that I needed to fetch the GC library and install it.  I had 7.2-alpha2 sitting around, so copied it over and installed it.

Unfortunately libunistring failed one of its tests when I was installing it.  At first glance, I'm not sure if it's a library bug or a testcase bug.

I supplied the --with-libunistring-prefix option, which got converted to a "-R/foo/bar/lib" option for the compiler... which gcc says it doesn't recognize, though it keeps on going.

Configure reports that readline is too old; I've got 5.2 installed.  Actually, I have the runtime support but not the "-dev" package installed, so there's no .so to link against, only a .so.5 for already-linked programs, so the error message is wrong.  I installed the -dev package.

A successful configure run took four minutes.  Building the whole thing took 99 minutes.  It's a single-core system and the build was almost entirely CPU-bound, so I didn't try a parallel build.

In my Guile build, "make check" got to sxml.ssax.test, where it seems to have hung in semaphore wait in the GC library.

I'm retrying with 7.2-alpha4; 100 minutes this time.  It compiled the C code okay again, but it had been working on compiling psyntax-pp.scm for over 25 CPU minutes when I wandered away.  Based on timestamps, it looks like it took 29 minutes to compile, and then boot-9.scm took another 11, though later stuff built more quickly.  Running tests... after 5m18s, it looks pretty happy; some expected failures and untested or unsupported cases, 1051 unresolved test cases, and 12292 passes.

So, yeah, it looks like it can build the current Guile code, albeit slowly.  But, if you've got the core and compiler-related stuff already built and are just hacking on other Scheme code, it seems okay.

Ken