Hi Elias,
I see. So when would you like to load the shared lib? We could do it by
)COMMAND or by a --command-line-option.
Sounds like you want it rather early, even before APL's immediate
execution loop starts. That would be a
--command-line-option then. We could keep the rest (function names in
libraries etc.) and just separate the
native function object. There would still be a native function object as
such, but you don't see it in APL and you
can't delete it either. *Of course you also can't call it from APL then**.**
*
/// Jürgen
On 05/10/2014 05:47 PM, Elias Mårtenson wrote:
First of all, sorry about the benchmark numbers. I thought I already
sent them but I see now that I had forgotten about it. I'll do it
tomorrow.
About the libraries, I see what you are saying. Having a library ID is
definitely one way of dealing with this (I suppose the package manager
can be used to pull it in if it's missing on the system).
However, the Emacs mode is different. A non-emacs user would not want
to (and shouldn't) have the library loaded. Likewise, if I load a dump
from someone who is not using Emacs, I don't want to lose the Emacs
mode that I already loaded.
I think that the Emacs mode native library and others, such as the SQL
one, are fundamentally different in the sense that the former attaches
to the runtime session and never interacts with the programs the user
writes, while the other is a "normal" library used by a specific
program that only differs from a normal APL program by the language
the library is written in.
The library ID system is definitely a good thing for the latter type
of native library.
However, I believe a separate model is needed for the former type. In
fact, the Emacs mode library doesn't even need a function entry point.
I can imagine other libraries of the same type, though none as obvious
as the editor integration stuff.
The former type need to load, stay in a single session, and never
interact with the user in any visible way. This includes being
included in a dump file. Even seeing the native entry point in the
output of )FNS can be confusing, and I would really like to be able to
avoid that one.
Regards,
Elias
