[racket] Portability of .zo files

At Sat, 14 Mar 2015 16:20:09 -0300, Gustavo Massaccesi wrote:
> Can I move a .zo file from a machine that has extflonum enabled to a
> machine that has extflonum disabled?

Yes.

> Can I move a .zo file from a machine that has extflonum disabled to a
> machine that has extflonum enabled?

Yes.

> More generally, when is it possible to copy .zo files form a computer
> to another computer, and expect that it will work fine?

Configuration details (extflonmun support, word size, whether places or
futures are enabled, etc.) should never interfere with ".zo" file
portability.


> (I had problems with some absolute paths before, so I try to not copy
> .zo files.)

Paths can indeed create problems, but the bytecode format and compiler
normally avoid them. 

A macro could expand to introduce an absolute path, but syntactic forms
from `racket` shouldn't do that (unless there's a bug). For example, as
long as a source file doesn't include `file` paths, `require` will not
create absolute paths in bytecode output.

Serialization can create absolute-path references, even from
relative-path references, but only when the serializing program is
started from a filesystem path (as opposed to a collection-based path).

It's possible that I've forgotten some catch other than serialization,
though. Can you say more about the situation where absolute paths
showed up?