There are many reasons to distribute software in a precompiled form:
The first reason must be considered very carefully. Precompiled libraries need more space - about 10 times more than the plain sources. So transmission time over the internet takes also time. In order to give you arguments we made a small test (on a Pentium-133) with the Kernel library:
Size |
Size |
Time to |
|
in source code | 175 kb | 38 kb |
28 sec. |
precompiled | 1,5 Mb | 590 kb |
3 sec. |
So, precompilation is probably faster - the time difference of 25 seconds is certainly smaller than the time you will need to download 550kb (and to uncompress them ;-)
Nevertheless, the second two reasons can be reasonable. You can export a library with
vec /ec -- executed in the library itself or with vec /ec:<cluster name>
the result is a subdirectory eexport in the library cluster. This cluster alone is sufficient to reconstruct the whole cluster (but not the Eiffel sources). So in order to install the precompiled cluster, create a proper subdirectory - lets call it newlib, copy the whole eexport cluster as whole to newlib and run
vec /ic /rnm:newlib
Now you can even delete newlib\eexport.
The eexport cluster can be distributed to any other system running the same release of Visual Eiffel. We suggest that you include in your distribution a small script containing the proper installation commands.