Re: Images and libraries (was: OBJECTS.FS Question)

Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Stephen Pelc wrote:

> > You don't write applications.
> > 
> > Especially, you don't write large applications.
> 
> Just for comparison: On the machine I'm sitting right now, MINOS
> (~10kloc) takes 0.1s to compile (with bigForth). MINOS can be
> save-system'd (and the time for this is included in the 0.1s). Theseus
> takes 0.08s to compile on top of it. The largest application so far
> that I created with Theseus(about 5kloc), the audio amplifier GUI I
> showed last EuroForth, takes 0.05s to compile. It takes 0.25s to
> initialize the USB interface to talk to the device, so I've not
> bothered with save-system-ing this part.
> 
> Yes, neither Anton nor I write 1 million line applications. It takes
> about 10 seconds to compile a 1 million line application on a 2GHz PC
> with bigFORTH. Gforth AFAIK compiles a bit faster than bigFORTH. For
> historical reasons, bigFORTH's compiler is more optimized for compile
> speed than for code speed (compared to VFX). I wanted reasonable
> compile times on my Atari ST, which is more than a 1000 times slower
> than a current PC. I also made quite some efforts back then to have as
> much as possible saved with SAVESYSTEM (excluding dynamically
> allocated memory).
 
If you're thinking in terms of compiling applications on the spot, would
it make sense to have a virtual file system? So you could put all your
files into one big file and users who install it all can then have just
two files to deal with -- the Forth system and the application file.

I guess people who send out applications in source form and are
concerned about piracy and such, might want some sort of obfuscator.
That isn't hard to do, and results in source code that's probably about
as hard to reverse-engineer as compiled code.

Source code is slower to compile than to use a saved system, though it
has to be a great big application for it to matter at all. And it's
probably going to be bulkier. It lets you avoid the complications of
SAVESYSTEM . Is there any other advantage?