First of all, this is a great patch. Not only does it optimize the resulting shlibs, it seems to consume less memory during compilation.
On Monday, Nov 4, 2002, at 12:26 Asia/Tokyo, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Nicholas Clark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
:I've been experimenting with how enc2xs builds the C tables that turn into the
:shared objects. enc2xs is building tables (arrays of struct encpage_t) which
:in turn have pointers to blocks of bytes.
Great, you seem to be getting some excellent results.
Worked absolutely fine on my PowerBook G4, too. Before: 208948 Encode/Byte/Byte.bundle 1984416 Encode/CN/CN.bundle 30076 Encode/EBCDIC/EBCDIC.bundle 33728 Encode/Encode.bundle 2590420 Encode/JP/JP.bundle 2208996 Encode/KR/KR.bundle 39720 Encode/Symbol/Symbol.bundle 1940288 Encode/TW/TW.bundle 17892 Encode/Unicode/Unicode.bundle
After: 178220 Encode/Byte/Byte.bundle 1085116 Encode/CN/CN.bundle 25336 Encode/EBCDIC/EBCDIC.bundle 33604 Encode/Encode.bundle 1308568 Encode/JP/JP.bundle 1209804 Encode/KR/KR.bundle 34896 Encode/Symbol/Symbol.bundle 1059040 Encode/TW/TW.bundle 17892 Encode/Unicode/Unicode.bundle
Trivial yet effective patch is to strip all comments therein. That should dramatically saves space but since *.ucm is, in a way, a source. So I am not sure if I should go for it....I have also wondered whether the .ucm files are needed after these have been built; if not, we should consider supplying with perl only the optimised table data if that could give us a space saving in the distribution - it would cut build time significantly as well as allowing us to consider algorithms that take much longer over the table optimisation, since they need be run only once when we integrate updated .ucm files.
Anyway, I am pretty much for integrating NC patch not just because it reduces shlib sizes but it also appears compiler safer (one of the optimizer features (AGGREGATE_TABLES) was dropped during the dev phase of perl 5.8 for the sake of djgpp and other low memory platforms). Unfortunately I am at my parents' place this week (to finish the book I am writing -- away from kids) so I do not have as much resources for extensive tests (the FreeBSD box I was using here at my parents just died (physically) the day before I came :-( ).
Another concern is that since it changes the internal structure of shlibs CPANized Encode::* modules need to be rebuilt as well, so the released version needs to print a warning on that -- oh wait! Encode.xs remains unchanged so Encode::* may still work....
Thank you, NC.
Dan the Encode Maintainer
