[LLVMdev] Is there room for another build system?

[David Greene]

On Monday 04 August 2008 16:59, Óscar Fuentes wrote:
> David Greene <dag at cray.com> writes:
> >> For my test suite I use Tcl (with TclX, no Expect). It watches stdout
> >> and stderr, gets exit codes and has a timer for killing hanged
> >> processes. Process control works the same on Windows and Unix and takes
> >> a less than 30 lines of code.
> >>
> >> What else do you need?
> >
> > A way to examine asm output and compate to expected patterns.
>
> This is a text manipulation task, isn't it? No problem.

No problem with Perl either, or Python.  Tcl is much less well-known.

Note that I don't particularly like any of these languages but I'm trying
not to let personal preference get in the way.  :)

> > A way to run performance regression tests (i.e. looking at CPU time
> > and allowing for fuzz between test runs).
>
> Do you mean that you want a language with that feature built-in?

No, I mean in the future we should have tests that actually pass/fail based
on their runtime performance.  To do that you need a way to time the test 
and a way to account for normal system variations (the fuzz bit).

We don't have any of these kinds of tests yet.  But I hope we do in the 
future.

> > In my experience Tcl is very hard to work with due to the
> > non-existence of any reasonable debugging tools on all platforms.
>
> For one reason or another, my Tcl code never grows so large that I miss
> a debugger. A `puts' here and there plus the repl is enough :-)

How many people know Tcl?  That has a direct impact on maintanability.

                                            -Dave