[cfe-dev] CMake Question: Do we need to support stand-alone builds?

[James Molloy]

My 2 cents: +1 for removing standalone builds. The complexity it
forces on the CMakeLists.txt has come to bite me in the past.

On 26 June 2012 08:01, Chandler Carruth <chandlerc at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello folks,
>
> TL;DR: When working on better/simpler CMake suport for Clang/LLVM I am often
> thwarted by one of the most complex parts of the Clang setup: the ability to
> do a "standalone" build of Clang. I would like to get rid of this feature in
> order to simplify and make more progress. Any objections?
>
>
> Most people don't even know what the "standalone" build is, so in summary it
> allows you to check out *just* clang and to build it against a separate
> checkout and build tree of LLVM. It doesn't re-use the build output tree of
> LLVM, or the source tree of LLVM.
>
> Why does this exist? I'll try to summarize the points from the last time I
> talked to Doug about it, but honestly, I don't use this so I may mess it up.
> I've CC-ed Doug who is (I suspect) one of the few using it to clarify
> anything I miss:
> 1) It allows updating the LLVM source checkout and build tree less
> frequently than the Clang checkout and build tree.
> 2) It allows sharing a single LLVM checkout and build tree amongst many
> Clang checkouts and build trees.
> 3) ???
>
> Certainly #1 and #2 can (in some cases) combine to improve incremental
> rebuild speed, but in practice I rarely benefit from them as the time is now
> heavily dominated by running the test suite. Thus, I see this benefit as
> diminishing these days, and also as offset by improved performance of CMake,
> especially when coupled with the bleeding edge ninja system.
>
>
> Now, why do I want to get rid of this? What is it preventing or getting in
> the way of?
> 1) Remove duplication! Massive amounts of the CMake infrastructure of LLVM
> are copied into Clang's CMake build in order for the latter to not depend on
> the former. What's worse, these copies have evolved independently and now
> often diverge, duplicate bugs, and sometimes give birth to their own bugs.
>
> 2) Remove duplication! The 'lit' based test running is needlessly duplicated
> in Clang's CMake build. It is also incorrect, missing dependencies, and
> behaving differently from LLVM's. Yep. 'make check && make clang-test' does
> not in fact test the same thing as 'make check-all'. Scary, eh?
>
> 3) Integrate with CompilerRT: This comes out of the LLVM projects subtree,
> and so is inherently missing in a stand-alone build.
>
> 4) Integrate with libc++: Same story as CompilerRT.
>
> 5) Integrate support for automatic bootstrapping: This will be among the
> most complex things to add to our CMake builds, but also one of the highest
> value. I'd really like to not spend time thinking about how this interacts
> with Clang's standalone cmake bits, but I have to as long as its there.
>
>
> So, thoughts?
> -Chandler
>
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