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Tom Smith · Guest

Matt, I stand corrected -- I simplified to the point of incorrectness. I
should have said, I don't like loading any lisps on startup except when it's
actually necessary. One is the keyboard macro scenaro you mention.

I explicitly load 5 compiled lisps on startup, totalling about 35K, by means
of the mnl. They could have been combined into one, but it's clearer to me
to break them up by function. For that matter, they could have all been in
the mnl itself, but AFAIK it can't be compiled, and I've had a thing about
securing code ever since our whole suite of R14 lisps walked out the door
with a short term employee.

The mnl contains only one load statement. The compiled file it loads is a
"copyright" protection gizmo. Unless certain conditions are true, it will
crash with a software license error message, and none of our other lisps
will load individually. If the conditions are met, then it loads 4 other
compiled lisps.

The first contains menu-related "library" functions. None of our menu
customizations will work unless this is loaded. The second is simply a
lisp-loader-upper file containing ai_ffile and all my autoload statements.
(When are they ever going to remember to fix that?) The third is entirely
keyboard macros -- only about 11K of them, but then we obviously have a much
simpler system than yours. The fourth defines block-related macros. It's
only a 4K file, but has a slightly noticeable load time, because it scans
our block folders at load time and writes a like-named insertion macro for
each block found, maybe 800 more macros in all. The result is that we can
insert any standard block simply by typing its name. (There are other
interfaces for inserting blocks, of course, but our keyboard junkies love
this.)

For the autoloading stuff, I mentioned that I compiled all our mini-lisps
into VLX's in groups of a certain size. I found the size that was
comfortable for us purely by experimentation, and it's nowhere near your
300K! Obviously, we have some very, very slow computers still in use, but
that will change soon. If I could autoload more stuff in a gulp, I would --
I'll adjust this when the computers get upgraded. My point was that
performance issues are relative, and what's fast enough in one setting might
be horribly slow in another.

As I told Ed, if I'm going to run a script on hundreds of drawings, I really
don't want ANYTHING loading except what's actually going to be used in the
script. I have an alternate profile which doesn't load any menu, thereby
taking all our lisp out of the loop, as well as the menu load time. It makes
a remarkable difference in how quickly files will open. I can script process
files 3 or 4 times as fast with the "naked" profile, and that's a worthwhile
difference.

The option for not autoloading things is interesting, thanks. I'll tuck that
away for future reference.

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