Re: [Chicken-users] reducing the size of chicken runtime

[Peter Bex]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 03:52:23PM +0000, Victor J wrote:
> Currently, a statically linked "hello world" executable is 1.7MB (stripped). 
> Is it possible to strip out some unnecessary features (i.e. R5RS stuff, 
> numeric tower, etc) so that the runtime is more suitable for an embedded (low 
> memory) system?

Hi Victor,

It can be done, but it's a little painful.  There's some information on
how to do that on the wiki:
http://wiki.call-cc.org/generating%20the%20smallest%20possible,%20self-contained%20executable

Note that there's no "numeric tower" in CHICKEN 4; there's only fixnums
and flonums, and the core needs both.  In CHICKEN 5, there's a numeric
tower.

Perhaps it is a nice goal for CHICKEN 5.1 or perhaps 6 to make it easier
to build smaller self-contained binaries.  Because CHICKEN 5 is more
explicitly structured as separate modules, it should (theoretically)
be easier to figure out internal dependencies and split it up.

Unfortunately, making the components of CHICKEN more fine-grained also
(currently) means we'll generate more toplevels, which results in a
longer startup time.

If binary size is really your main concern, you might want to take a
look at Chibi Scheme: it is quite modular and has many compilation-time
options for stripping it down to the bare minimum.

Cheers,
Peter

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