[cfe-dev] Compile Server?

[David Claughton]

Hi,

So, over the Christmas break I spent some time trying to get my head
around the clang code base.  While looking around for a little project I
could do to get me started, I happened upon this thread [1] from last
summer which piqued my interest.

[1] http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2010-June/009473.html

The thread describes the idea of a compile-server and some ideas of how
such a thing might be used to improve compile speeds.  However I had a
poke around the source and cfe-commits and as far as I can tell nothing
much has happened with the idea.

Is someone still actively looking at this, or planning on doing so?  If
not, I wouldn't mind having a go at it myself.

Mind you, I had a go this weekend at hacking in some (really ugly)
socket code just to get a feel for it, and TBH I'm starting to wonder if
an actual server is the best approach - it seems a tad over-engineered.

As I understand it, the goal is to present a single instance of clang
with a list of compile jobs it needs to perform, allowing it to cache
headers and intermediate results in memory.  IMHO the most obvious way
of doing this is to simply read a list of job descriptions from a file.

The main (only?) reason of using a server process is because 'make' and
other build tools do not call the compiler in this way, but call it
repeatedly for each source file.  However I can't help but think that if
some sort of "batch mode" was available and it allowed for significantly
improved compile times, then people would find ways to make the various
build tools work with it.

What do you guys think?

Cheers,

	David.