RE: incremental linking

[Ian.Stark@ed.ac.uk]

David,

> Currently MLj links & compiles an entire project at a time.  Would
> it not be posible to do incremental linking?

One problem with recompiling from scratch in MLj is that the
post-link optimisation takes such a long time - and as Andrew points
out, pickling intermediate information won't help this too much.
This is because there is some genuinely hard work going on to get
reasonable code size and execution time.

However, for development work optimisation isn't as important, so
perhaps one could sort out a switch to adjust between doing poor
compilation quickly, and decent compilation slowly.  Would this
help?  (I'm going to regret this, as Andrew Kennedy will now tell me
just how bad poor compilation would be.)

> I'm willing to hack around in the code, esp. if I know that I'm
> doing something that has a chance of being incorporated into the
> release.

That's the spirit.  Bug fixes are always welcome.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Ian Stark, Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science,
           Division of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh

Personal:  Ian.Stark@ed.ac.uk     http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/stark
MLj 0.2 :  mlj@dcs.ed.ac.uk       http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/mlj
--------------------------------------------------------------------