Hello, I'm working on a racket buildpack for use on Heroku (again -- I tried and aborted it about a year ago) but have noticed that the size of Racket and startup time in racket applications suffers quite a bit because 'make install' installs all kind of stuff: mzscheme compatibility libs, gui libs (on a system with no gui stuff), textbook curricula languages, et al.
These bloat the size of racket's build output by quite a bit, and more subtly, increase the number of file system metadata operations required to extract racket and the application on start-up. I have tried the install-plain make target and it is indeed much smaller, but it compiles/installs very little -- no raco, and apparently very little byte-compiling, because the racket REPL takes an age to load -- so it's basically unworkable. Is there a reasonable in-between option? In spite of this issue, I have gotten racket building successfully (with a few hiccups) and maybe pretty soon deploying a racket program on Heroku will be very simple, although I'm sure some refinements to the 'build pack' will make things better still. In particular, I'm thinking about crawling through the submitted racket source and finding all (require) forms as to evaluate them up-front at submission time: because running programs do not have a persistant file system, not doing this would result in every freshly started program downloading from PLaneT over and over, and, if PLaneT were to go down, no non-trivial racket program could start up successfully. Cheers, -- fdr ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
