[tex-live] LaTeX enhancement

[Karl Berry]

    which appears not to have the source
    code for the latex command.

It was left off the inst and demo discs by (a very bad) mistake.
It's on the live disc.  You can also download it, of course.
http://tug.org/ftp/texlive/Contents/live/source/ or from CTAN
(systems/texlive/Source).

However, as others have already suggested, I doubt you will find that
modifying the source to be a fruitful exercise.

     forking and execing each time.

My experience is that, these days, fork/exec are phenomenally fast and
almost never the bottleneck.  What is more likely the bottleneck is disk
accesses and the startup overhead of reading the databases, etc.
Reprogramming that would be a huge, huge, huge, job.  Being a C expert
is just the beginning.

Sebastian's idea of making one (or a few) big file(s) and splitting up
the result, and/or Alois's idea of putting everything on a ram disk,
seems more likely to accomplish what you need, with a lot less work.


Good luck,
karl