Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:

> Hi Ludo,
>
>>> Here are some important items I can think of:
> […]
>>>   • Guile 2.2 compiler terrible issue:
>>>     <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2017-05/msg00033.html>.
>
> One way to side-step this issue for the upcoming release is to use one
> Guile process per file when running “guix pull”.  This will make it run
> a lot slower, but that would be better than the current situation.

I've attached a workaround that I've been using for the last 6 weeks on
my MIPS-based Yeeloong running GuixSD, since it only has 1 GB of RAM and
otherwise it would not be able to successfully build the 'guix' package.

Note that I never use 'guix pull', so I'm not sure off-hand whether this
solves the problem there, but it certainly greatly reduces the memory
needed to run 'make' and thus to build the 'guix' package.

This patch modifies build-aux/compile-all.scm to work as follows: after
loading all modules in the parent process, it then forks off a child and
compiles 20 modules in parallel within that child while the parent
waits.  When the child is finished compiling those 20 modules, the child
exits (thus freeing the memory leaked during compilation), and then the
parent spawns a new child to compile the next 20 modules, and so on,
until all the modules are compiled.

We should probably consider applying this to master.  Thoughts?

      Mark