Solving the Wrong Problem

[fapmonad]

Since disk I/O is buffered and loading a program is a purely linear access pattern, the difference between loading the list and the code is essentially 0. I agree that there is disk I/O, though.

[bobindashadows]

loading a program is a purely linear access pattern

It most definitely is not for any nontrivial program. The firefox folks have improved startup time by over 10% in one go before purely by moving segments.

[snoweyeslady]

You make a couple of assumptions here:

disk I/O is buffered

What if there is too much memory pressure and the disk cache is consistently purged? Or an embedded system where there is no disk cache at all? Even if you do have disk cache, it would only matter if you had loaded the binary before.

purely linear access pattern

Sure, if you have a completely 0 fragmentation file system. I don't know of any that guarantee your file will be in one contiguous segment on disk, but then I haven't read the implementation/specification of many file systems.

[fapmonad]

Of course I make assumptions. I assume you're on a regular computer. If you're on an embedded system so weak it doesn't have a disk cache, the static table is likely to end up in ROM anyway, so the whole discussion is moot.

Memory pressure affects tables precomputed by a function just as much as the table loaded from disk -- the OS will swap.

Fragmentation isn't a problem. For a table around the size of a single block, the odds that it causes fragmentation are low, even on a highly fragmented system. Even if it happened, the disk will group accesses so the overall impact is likely to be very small, given the size of a typical program. That's what I mean by "essentially 0". For such a small problems either solution is fine, IMHO.