Re: Naive DEFSYSTEM replacement

On Sat, 2025-07-26 at 08:35 +0200, joswig (as joswig at lisp dot de)
wrote:
> I don't think what was provided is a DEFSYSTEM at all. It doesn't
> define a system, since there is nothing which would be a SYSTEM data
> structure and there are no top level operations over that data
> structure.
> 

Well no, I never said it was. I said, "huccome ASDF is so many
thousands of lines of code when I can achieve *what-I-want* in 19 lines
of code?" 

Other responses have suggested that *what-I-want* is not the point of
ASDF and other DEFSYSTEM forms at all.

> DEFCLASS defines a class, DEFUN defines a function, DEFTYPE defines a
> type...
> 
> The macro actually creates code to directly execute a computed list
> of lispworks:compile-file-if-needed function calls.
> Since there are no dependencies managed, it always executes all of
> them.
> 
> We can simply turn the macro into a function without loss of
> functionality.
> So far there is no need and no advantage in generating code via a
> macro

Dudebro. Did you seriously just spend time reworking a proof-of-concept
10-minute nasty hack just because it didn't conform to your stylistic
preferences?

Wouldn't it have just been easier to answer the question that I
actually asked? I mean, I put the question in its own ====== delimiters
and everything! 

> I can remember full compilation times of Portable Common LOOPS (PCL),
> a portable CLOS implementation, on some machine taking half an hour.
> COMPILE-SYSTEM would then minimize the compilation time, by only
> compiling/loading necessary code into a running system. One would
> back then avoid restarting Lisp and avoid doing full compilations of
> large systems.
> The idea of SYSTEMS was born when machines had 1 MIPS or less CPU
> speed.

Ok. So this is more interesting. You're suggesting that the whole
concept of Lisp systems was about *incremental* *recompilation*, not
about dependency management.

But my 10-minute shonk-o-rama also handled this via 
COMPILE-FILE-IF-NEEDED rather than a straight COMPILE-FILE.

So again... what on Earth are ASDF and other DEFSYSTEM forms actually
doing that requires 100x as much code? 

Obviously it's doing *something* ... what value am I not understanding
here?

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