You can find it on the QITAB homepage: http://common-lisp.net/project/qitab
POIU will notably compile each Lisp file in its own forked process, in parallel with other operations (compilation or loading). However, it will load FASLs serially as they become available.
POIU will only make a difference with respect to ASDF if the dependencies are not serial (i.e. no difference for systems using :serial t everywhere). You can however use Andreas Fuchs's ASDF-DEPENDENCY-GROVEL to autodetect minimal dependencies from an ASDF system (or a set of multiple such).
POIU may speed up compilation by utilizing all CPUs of an SMP machine. POIU may also reduce the memory pressure on the main (loading) process. POIU will enforce separation between compile- and load- time environments, helping you detect when :LOAD-TOPLEVEL is missing in EVAL-WHEN's (as needed for incremental compilation even with vanilla ASDF). POIU will also catch *some* missing dependencies as exist between the files that it will happen to compile in parallel (but won't catch other dependencies that may otherwise be missing from your system).
When a compilation fails in a parallel process, POIU will retry compiling in the main (loading) process so you get the usual ASDF error behavior, with a chance to debug the issue and restart the operation.
POIU was currently only made to work with SBCL, CLISP and CCL. Porting to another Lisp implementation that supports ASDF should not be difficult.
Warning to CCL users: you need to save a CCL image that doesn't start threads at startup in order to use POIU (or anything that uses fork). Watch QITAB for some package that does just that, single-threaded-ccl.
To use POIU, just load poiu.lisp after asdf.lisp is loaded, then use it with (asdf:operate 'asdf:parallel-load-op :your-system) Once again, you may want to first use asdf-dependency-grovel to minimize the dependencies in your system.
POIU was initially written by Andreas Fuchs in 2006 as part of an experiment funded by ITA Software, Inc. It was latter modified by Francois-Rene Rideau who wrote the CCL port. The original copyright of ASDF (below) applies to POIU.
This page is linked from: development qitab
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