Subject: Re: When to recompile/reeval?
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 14 Oct 2002 13:58:17 +0000
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3243592697125968@naggum.no>

* Peter Seibel
| I guess I'll go read about defsystem and see if I can find that paper
| Kent Pitman wrote about what he wants from a build system. Thanks to
| everyone who responded.

  Since nobody has even mentioned this yet, I would like you to consider
  another option: Do not compile your code in the first place.  The great
  value of running interpreted is that macros you change will affect their
  uses immediately.  If you intend to do a lot of macro programming, you
  will find that compiling macros and functions using macros is a serious
  drag on programmer performance.  While testing and developing your code
  interactively, chances are pretty good that you will be far slower than
  the interpreted environment of your Common Lisp system and that any time
  you might save in executing compiled code is more than offset by the
  time you waste with your what-to-compile-when-problem.

  Programming in Common Lisp is all about not worrying about needless
  things, and if you need to worry about when a macro is being used because
  the caller has been compiled before you changed it, you should not ask
  what to recompile, but what to compile in the first place.

-- 
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder.
Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.