[luatex] LuaTeX precompilation

[luigi scarso]

On Wed, 20 Dec 2023 at 12:21, Henrik Mannerström <
henrik.mannerstrom at gmail.com> wrote:

> According to my very limited understanding, luatex is generally slower
> than pdftex because the font loading is more involved [1,2,3,4]. In pdftex,
> compilation can be sped up by precompiling a preamble to a format, which
> loads much faster. To my understanding precompiled formats are not that
> useful in luatex due to mixing of tex- and lua-code. [5]
>
> As I'm probably not the only one that writes many more short math-oriented
> notes than complete books, the startup speed of luatex is an issue. I
> resisted the switch from pdftex to luatex very long because of this.
>
> How hard would it be to make a luatex compatible precompiled format? One
> that basically serialises the whole luatex state to a file and could re-use
> it? Would it speed up the compilation of short documents? Is there any
> plans or projects related to this?
>
> Best regards and season's greetings,
> thank you for the wonderful tools you have brought us!
> Henrik Mannerström
>
> [1]
> https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/690903/format-dumping-using-lualatex-and-mylatexformat
> [2]
> https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/114742/speeding-up-compilation-using-precompiled-preamble-with-luatex
> [3]
> https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/75118/why-does-it-take-lualatex-so-long-to-load-fonts-and-can-i-speed-it-up
> [4]
> https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/234757/why-is-lualatex-so-slow-and-is-there-anything-i-can-do-about-it
> [5]
> https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/324559/guidelines-for-using-mylatexformat-with-luatex
>

It seems that only  [5] refers to a recent luatex and in any case we need
at least one "approved by the community"  test file (i.e. not a "badly
written" one) .


--
luigi
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