[tex-live] TeXLive-CD/DVD (Installation)

[David Kastrup]

Taco Hoekwater <taco at elvenkind.com> writes:

> Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
>>
>>   > I hope it will be smart enough to avoid allocating memory for TeX
>>   > when it is going to be used as a script engine.  Compared to Lua
>>   > itself, the TeX text segment is already a sizeable baggage even
>>   > though there is a good chance that on modern operating systems
>>   > most of it will never get paged when just using the Lua part.
>
> The TeX memory data is never initialized in the texlua case, and
> you can't get access to the typesetting-related tables.
>
> Since we want to eventually start using texlua as a tool for batch
> editting OpenType fonts also, the text segment size is unlikely to
> shrink. The fontforge segment is already almost as large as the
> tex segment, and we need a bit more still.
>
> But I expect most systems are copy-on-read these days.

You likely mean demand-paged.  Different buzzword.

> We know for a fact that there is no speed difference between running
> texlua and standalone lua 5.1 on linux, nor windows XP, because we
> tested that.
>
>> Maybe in the future texlua can be a separate program, but it doesn't
>> make sense to ask Taco to maintain two programs at the moment.
>
> This may be easier than you think. It is quite possible that just a
> few strategically placed #ifdef's will do the trick. I'll get back
> to you on that.

Seems pretty pointless if you already tested the startup times.  Then
the only advantage would seem to be that a separate binary would put
people at ease.  But a symbolic link with a different name would
likely serve a similar purpose.

-- 
David Kastrup