[fpc-devel] Request for LEB128 discussion again

[J. Gareth Moreton]

Hi everyone,

How is everyone doing? Noticed it's a bit quiet on this mailing list, so 
I hope everyone is still alive!

This one has some slightly selfish connotations, because I'm having a 
lot of problems with disk full errors on my development platform when 
working with FPC (and running "make distclean" on my FPC source 
directory freed up nearly 700 MB of storage).  With these 
considerations, I would like to ask if it's possible to consider 
encoding some fields as LEB128 again - 
https://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=35299 (the first bit of the 
issue discusses an alternative encoding system) - this provides a 
significant saving on some fields without too much of a speed loss.  It 
was suspended because of concern with performance loss during quick 
recompilation, but considering the time increase was from 3 to 4 seconds 
or so, I don't think his issue is significant to be a concern because 
the total times are mere seconds.

I know in the modern age that hard storage isn't a concern for most, but 
it seems that in some situations, it can be, and LEB128 is otherwise a 
nice simple compression system for integers that are often very small 
but nonetheless need to support the full range.

Gareth aka. Kit


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