NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #18/NN_1992_18.iso/spool/comp/unix/ultrix/6388

Internet Message Format | 1992-08-21 | 1.9 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!mcsun!uknet!cf-cm!robert
From: [e-mail] (Robert Evans)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.ultrix
Subject: Linking time for PHIGS programs
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 21 Aug 92 10:39:53 GMT
Sender: [e-mail] (Network News System)
Organization: University of Wales College of Cardiff, Cardiff, WALES, UK.
Lines: 26

We're using DECPHIGS on PEX DECstation 5000/120s in a student teaching lab.  The students
tend to write a PHIGS C program, compile it - find it is incorrect, rewrite it,
compile it again, run it, alter it etc.  The usual program development cycle.  Last
year, these lab sessions were scheduled to be one hour long.  We found that the
students had great difficulty in developing their programs owing to the time the
Ultrix loader spent linking the PHIGS programs.  The PHIGSC library is about 9MB in size
and the X11 library is more than 4MB and other libraries are needed too.   Even the smallest
PHIGS program is about 6MB.

In an example I tried, the linker took nearly 4 minutes (239 seconds) to create the runnable
image.  The same program on a Sun SPARC 1 to 5 (yes five) seconds to build into a
dynamically loadable image and 12 seconds to build a static image.  The image on the
DECstation is 6591704 bytes (6448K) and on the SPARC it's 417792 bytes (416K).

Can anyone suggest a way of improving the development cycle time?  Is there a faster version
of ld available?  Can the libraries be divided to put commonly-used functions in a smaller
archive?  Why are the DECPHIGS programs so big anyway?

We're running in an ATHENA environment, the user's disc space is on a DECserver 5000 accessed
over NFS.

Thanks.
--
  Robert Evans, Department of Computing Mathematics,
  University of Wales College of Cardiff, Wales, UK.  [phone] x 5518
  [e-mail]                      (FAX) [phone]