[jl8] SysImage

The PackageCompiler is the suggested way to generate binary with Julia machinery. Support to manage (save & reflection) optimized functions is currently under development by Julia developers. It is still far to be good enough for us to support saving snapshots in binary form containing optimized/complied code (july 2022). We must wait for something better from the Julia devs because current suppport is NOT written in Julia and machinery is made at lowest level (by julia executable).

• It takes aprox 17minutes to produce a SysImage with U8 snapshot (kernel+frameworks+SystemServer).
• The generated sysimage will be about 240Mb in size, for a S8 smalltalk snapshot of 4Mb.

How to generate a SysImage?

1. Prepare your system as a Package
   • See ServerApp sample to learn how to embedd a S8 snaphot and generate precompiles list.
     • Read more on ServerApp/src/ReadMe.txt
2. Create a new folder for a project to produce the SysImage
   • Like folder U8SysImageEnv
3. On OS console, go to folder
   • cd U8SysImageEnv
4. Start a clean julia environment
   • julia -q
5. Load PackageCompiler
   • using PackageCompiler
6. Activate project
   • press "]" (to invoke package manager; you should be prompt change to "pkg>"
   • activate . (to activate project in this folder)
   • Add required packages e.g.:
     • add Debugger
     • add HTTP
     • add JSON3
     • add Dates
     • add Sockets
     • add ../ServerApp #local project containing S8 snapshot
   • st # to check project status
   • press Backspace key to return to julia command line
7. Produce the system image evaluating:
   • @time create_sysimage([:ServerApp]; sysimage_path="u8_sysimage.dll")
8. Wait minutes for the generation of the SysImage

References

• Creating a sysimage using PackageCompiler