On 23 March 2007 17:01, Marc Espie wrote:
> In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> you write:
>> On Mar 20, 2007, at 11:23 PM, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
>>> As for configure scripts... autoconf -j is long overdue ;-)
>
>> Is that the option to compile autoconf stuff into fast running
>> efficient code? :-)
Nah, it's the parallel autoconf flag....
>> But seriously, I think we need to press autoconf into generating 100x
>> faster code 90% of the time. Maybe prebundling answers for the
>> common targets...
>
> Doesn't win all that much.
Here's a thought, off the top of my head and not deeply considered because
it's friday afternoon...
The main overhead in autoconf is all the forking and spawning and doing lots
and lots of operations which all involve large numbers of small files each
processed one at a time with one or more of a number of tools.
It would be kinda neat if instead of repeating this endless cycle of cat'ing
here-docs into files, compiling those files and executing or grepping the
results it could cat the whole lot into one big file, compile it once, then
parse the error messages to spot the non-compiling (AC_COMPILE in particular)
tests, then re-cat the surviving tests (well, just the execute tests) into
another file, synthesize a main() that invokes them one after another, and
parses the output from the whole lot in one go.
I can see it being tricky to shoehorn execution tests all into the same
executable, but I do think it should be pretty likely that it would be
possible to teach it to do all the compile tests in a single compilation,
shouldn't it?
cheers,
DaveK
--
Can't think of a witty .sigline today....
