On Nov 10, 2006, at 9:08 PM, Geert Bosch wrote:
Most people aren't waiting for compilation of single files.
If they do, it is because a single compilation unit requires
parsing/compilation of too many unchanging files, in which case
the primary concern is avoiding redoing useless compilation.
The common case is that people just don't use the -j feature
of make because
1) they don't know about it
2) their IDE doesn't know about it
3) they got burned by bad Makefiles
4) it's just too much typing
I'll mention a case where compilation was wickedly slow even
when using -j#. At The MathWorks, the system could take >45 minutes
to compile. (This was partially due to the fact that the files were
located on an NFS mounted drive. But also because C++ compilation
is way slower than C compilation.) Experiments with distributed
make showed promise.
It would be interesting to see if parallelizing the compiler
(instead of just using 'make -j#') will give us an overall gain.
Though it also seems fruitful to pursue some of the other
optimizations you mentioned.
-bw
