Re: Guile startup

[Jonas Oberg <jonas@coyote.org>]

Chris Bitmead <chris.bitmead@bigfoot.com> writes:

> Guile is slow to start up. There are things that can, will and should be
> done to speed it up a lot, but they havn't been done yet and they're not
> easy (or they would have been done already.).

Ah, I see.

> On my computer it takes .62 secs to start up guile. Can you tell us any
> more about what your program does so we can offer suggestions?

It's basically a simplistic calculator for rpn which implements a stack
and the standard operators and some built-in functions. My plan is to
implement Guile to make it easily extensible so that it would be possible
to do things like;

rpn> function writeout ((set! p (open-file "foo.txt" "w"))
                          (display (top-of-stack) p)
                          (close-port p))
rpn> 1 2 + writeout

It's a fairly simple RPN implementation; I use it mostly to learn new
programs and libraries by adding their respective functionality to the
program. I'm also interested in having Guile work well with floating
point units, so I've subscribed to the guile-numerical in hopes of
picking up some information on that topic.

Jonas