Re: both native & bytecode
Hello all,
On Wed, Oct 27, 2004 at 09:06:33PM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 27, 2004 at 07:21:45PM +0200, Samuel Mimram wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I have a few comments on your control file, I might be wrong since I
> > don't really know ara :
> > * if you don't need the Graphics or Tk modules, you should depend on the
> > -nox versions of the packages (in particular for ara which does not
> > require X, I guess). Anyway you don't need to depend on ocaml,
> > ocaml-base and ocaml-base-nox since ocaml-base-nox is implied by
> > ocaml-base which is implied by ocaml. So I would simply put
> > ocaml-nox-3.08 in the Build-Depends.
> > * Does xara-gtk really use lablgl? (it's in the build-deps)
>
> It is transitivily depended by lablgtk2 anyway.
>
> > * You should not build-depend on ocaml-native-compilers since it is not
> > available on some non-native archs. You could depend on
> > ocaml-best-compilers but anyway your app is, I guess, small enough not
> > to require native compilers when available.
>
> I thought so at first, but had second thought about it. Ara does pretty heavy
> status file parsing, and it seem to know over 20k packages on my install (sid
> + some stuff), so altough this is disk bound, a native code version is well
> waranted (unless i am missing something).
I second this. On my machine, the bytecode is 3 times slower than the
native code, and it makes a usability difference : 2s vs 6s startup
time on my P4 at 2.4GHz ; ara parses 39658 packages... On a Pentium
120 this would give approx. 20s vs a full minute and many people still
have these, and ara will be important for these people since they usually
can't use GTK2 stuff like Xara or Synaptic because it's too heavy.
Another advantage of native code is that it doesn't depend on Ocaml
runtime.
PS. Thomas, Sven, George : are you all subscribed to debian-ocaml-maint ?
--
Berke Durak
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