[cfe-dev] Fast "make test" for windows

[Eli Friedman]

On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 5:00 PM, Argiris Kirtzidis <akyrtzi at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> As some of you may know, doing a "make test" for clang to check for
> regressions on windows is *painfully* slow. It makes grown men weep like
> little defenseless babies...
> To keep my sanity, I've created a little utility that performs the same
> task blazingly fast; here are the numbers:
>
> make test : 14m 45s
> wintest : 45sec

Wow, that's a lot... Process creation is relatively slow on Windows,
so I'm not especially surprised.  That said, have you tried to figure
out what exactly is slow for the regular make test?  It might be
possible to significantly speed up the tests by reorganizing them a
bit, so that they don't create so many processes (for example, by
making TestRunner.sh loop over all the tests, and avoiding some
repeated work inside TestRunner.sh, and maybe being a bit more clever
about how we run the tests).  That way, we wouldn't have to worry
about maintaining two versions of the test runner.

Also, if you're running the tests with cygwin, have you tried using
msys instead?  It might be significantly faster.

> It's a little .NET 2.0 console executable, if anybody is interested let
> me know and I'll clean it up a bit and post it.

I'd be interested to see the source to see what it's doing
differently; depending on how it works, it might be possible to adapt
the Makefile/shell script to do something similar and see a similar
speedup without a second testrunner.

That said, I don't do any significant development on Windows at the moment.

-Eli