[lazarus] Clean build from nothing

Marco van de Voort marcov at stack.nl
Wed Jun 25 05:59:22 EDT 2003


> > If you can't think of a use for the C library, then why do you ask us to
> > use it ? ;-)
> 
> Well, I can :)
> 
> Libraries are loaded into the memory only once, no matter how many processes
> use them. Thus the memory used for the library is shared. This heavily
> reduces memory needs for a system.

This has nothing to do with that. FPC only use about 50 primitives from
the kernel, that would be otherwise used from libc.

It doesn't matter for memory usage where I get them. The kernel is also
resident it seems.

So in theory the kernel interface could be beneficial even. Unused parts of
the libc can be swapped out when a heavy FPC program is running.

> I think, the current free pascal concept (avoiding C libraries, mainly
> libc) is usable only because on a tipical system only a few pascal
> processes run at once; the rest of the system is written in C, so enough
> memory remains to run the pascal programs :)

The main reason why this is important is for OS tools, like the shell and
make. They are often called recursively. But if one of them were FPC based,
you'd have a 100kb redundancy with a FPC rtl shared lib, and the C ones.
Big deal :-)

Don't forget we only need a very small subset of libc, (say 10-40 kb of it's
800). The rest is not OS library, but C language runtime, which we can't
use anyway.


Again, theory and practice in Unix advocacy are WIDE apart ;-)






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