[cfe-dev] RFC: Upcoming Build System Changes

[Óscar Fuentes]

Chris Lattner <clattner at apple.com> writes:

> On Oct 28, 2011, at 12:54 AM, Óscar Fuentes wrote:
>> A good measure of how fast a set of Makefile are is to run the build
>> with all targets up-to-date. Both builds takes a few seconds (3 or so)
>> on my Linux quad core box. Whatever improvement can be achieved on this
>> seems pretty insignificant.
>
> There are different overheads in different scenarios.  The makefiles
> get really poor utilization out of a 8 or 16-way machine because of
> implicit synchronization between different sublibraries.

BTW, adding explicit library dependencies will make the parallel builds
worse, because you know when a dependency is missing (the build fails)
but you don't know when a dependency is superfluous.

>> Furthermore, recursive make is necessary for automatic generation of
>> header dependencies, among other things. The makefiles generated by
>> cmake are "partially" recursive for that reason:
>> 
>> http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake_FAQ#Why_does_CMake_generate_recursive_Makefiles.3F
>
> I don't understand, what does having one makefile per directory have
> to do with header file generation?

No one makefile per directory, but recursive make. Automatic header
dependencies are usually supported by recursively invoking `make', which
is the slow part. Having one makefile per directory may require
recursive invocation or not, depending on how the build was written.

[snip]

>> Anyways, if you wish to avoid duplicating info on both Makefile and
>> CMakeLists.txt there is a simple solution: read and parse the Makefile
>> from the corresponding CMakeLists.txt. For instance, if you put the
>> library dependencies on the Makefile like this:
>> 
>> LLVMLIBDEPS := foo zoo bar
>
> I don't see how that is any better than what is being proposed.
> You're just moving the complexity from one place to the other,

What I propose requires about 20 lines in the cmake build. And what Dan
proposes will require changes on the cmake build as well, I'm pretty
sure that those changes would be much more intrusive.

> and blocking future improvements that will build on this.

Dan proposes to have a file with the info and processing that file for
generating stuff for cmake and `make' (after making the necessary
changes on both builds.) What I propose is to read that info from cmake
itself. No python required. How is that blocking future improvements?