Re: rc futures

[Chet Ramey <chet@nike.ins.cwru.edu>]

> > 23. Dynamically load readline only when rc is about to read from a
> > terminal device.  This would mean that a single rc binary would be
> > lean and fast for scripts, but still do readline for interactive use.
> > However, I suspect that the effort involved in making this happen
> > portably would be considerable.
> 
> I don't even know what to say about this. The mind boggles. The idea that
> the readline library is so cumbersome that it needs to be dynamically
> loaded really weirds me out. Is it that huge now? Processors have improved
> by a couple orders of magnitude since I wrote rc! What if a talented
> programmer spent a month doing a readline replacement?  Could he make
> it weigh in at 10% of the size of GNU readline? 5%?  1%?

It's not *that* cumbersome.

What about dynamic linking and shared libraries?  Maybe I'm missing
something here, but wouldn't simply linking rc against an
already-installed readline library, if one exists, result in 90% of
the benefits of rolling your own dynamic linking stuff without the
pain?

Bash has code in configure (and an option to select it) to figure out
whether or not to link against a system version of libreadline rather
than the version that comes in the bash distribution.


-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
( ``Discere est Dolere'' -- chet)

Chet Ramey, CWRU    chet@po.CWRU.Edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/