Re: [MIT-Scheme-devel] [commit aafa6ac04] Initial draft of program to grovel over files looking for libraries.

[Taylor R Campbell]

> Date: Sat, 24 Nov 2018 15:16:39 -0800
> From: Chris Hanson <address@hidden>
> 
> I'm a little confused about what the problem is. Could you give specific
> examples?
> 
> I'm also unsure about why having a file-system cache will help. Other than
> persistence, what advantage does having the cache in the file system
> provide? I can see an argument that the file system forces a particular
> organization to the cache, but the downside is that the implementation is
> more complex than one in memory.
> 
> I've been assuming that it's OK to have more than one library in a single
> file. The file-system approach doesn't handle that naturally, though
> multiple links to a single file is reasonable.

What I'm asking for is that the loader's job be simple: to load an
installed library (foo bar baz), map it to a pathname, say
$libdir/mit-scheme-svm1/sld/foo/bar/baz.sld, and try to load that.  If
that means installing a set of libraries defined in a single file
requires making multiple symlinks to that file, that's fine.

Right now there's no cache, but if the process by which Scheme
discovers loadable libraries is to find everything named
*.scm/*.bin/*.com anywhere under $libdir/mit-scheme-svm1, it will be
tempting to make a cache since that's not going to be fast (and both
the on-disk cache and the in-memory cache that find-scheme-libraries!
currently creates will have to have some way to be invalidated).