From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from nike.ins.cwru.edu ([129.22.8.219]) by hawkwind.utcs.utoronto.ca with SMTP id <25024>; Sun, 19 Dec 1999 02:25:17 -0500 Received: (chet@localhost) by nike.ins.cwru.edu (8.9.3/CWRU-2.5-bsdi) id LAA15758; Thu, 16 Dec 1999 11:46:11 -0500 (EST) (from chet) Date: Thu, 16 Dec 1999 11:40:55 -0500 From: Chet Ramey To: byron@rakitzis.com Subject: Re: rc futures Cc: rc@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu, tjg@star.le.ac.uk, chet@po.cwru.edu Reply-To: chet@po.CWRU.Edu Message-ID: <991216164055.AA15747.SM@nike.ins.cwru.edu> Read-Receipt-To: chet@po.CWRU.Edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-In-Reply-To: Message from byron@rakitzis.com of Tue, 14 Dec 1999 04:44:19 -0500 (id <199912140944.BAA04801@peanut.rakitzis.com>) > > 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/