[cfe-dev] JumboSupport: making unity builds easier in Clang

Tue Apr 10 07:34:23 PDT 2018

On Tue, Apr 10, 2018 at 10:27 AM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com> wrote:

> I haven't looked at the patches in detail - but generally a jumbo build
> feels like a bit of a workaround & maybe there are better long-term
> solutions that might fit into the compiler.
>

I feel the same way. However, modules need significant investment to get
going, and people do jumbo builds if we want it or not. WebKit is doing the
same thing for example
https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2018/02/17/on-compiling-webkit-now-twice-as-fast/

People will use this, if we want them to or not (I have some influence in
chrome land and wasn't able to talk them out of it, since it does provide
huge benefits), and the workarounds needed without compiler support are
gnarly.

So I think we might want to revisit our "you don't really want this" stance
on this topic we've had historically and instead try to make this work well.

> A few sort of background questions:
>
> * Have you tried Clang header modules ( https://clang.llvm.org/docs/
> Modules.html )? (explicit (granted, explicit might only be practical at
> the moment using Google's internal version of Bazel - but you /might/ get
> some comparison numbers from a Google Chrome developer) and implicit)
>   * The doc talks about maybe disabling jumbo builds for a single target
> for developer efficiency, with the risk that a header edit would maybe be
> worse for the developer than the jumbo build - this is where modules would
> help as well, since it doesn't have this tradeoff property of two different
> dimensions of "more work" you have to choose from.
> * I was going to ask about the lack of parallelism in a jumbo build - but
> reading the doc I see it's not a 'full' jumbo build, but chunkifying the
> build - so there's still some/enough parallelism. Cool :)
>
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 10, 2018 at 5:12 AM Mostyn Bramley-Moore via cfe-dev <
> cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
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>> *Hi,I am a member of a small group of Chromium developers who are working
>> on adding a unity build[1] setup to Chromium[2], in order to reduce the
>> project's long and ever-increasing compile times.  We're calling these
>> "jumbo" builds, because this term is not as overloaded as "unity".We're
>> slowly making progress, but find that a lot of our time is spent renaming
>> things in anonymous namespaces- it would be much simpler if it was possible
>> to automatically treat these as if they were file-local.   Jens Widell has
>> put together a proof-of-concept which appears to work reasonably well, it
>> consists of a clang plugin and a small clang
>> patch:https://github.com/jensl/llvm-project-20170507/tree/wip/jumbo-support/v1
>> <https://github.com/jensl/llvm-project-20170507/tree/wip/jumbo-support/v1>https://github.com/jensl/llvm-project-20170507/commit/a00d5ce3f20bf1c7a41145be8b7a3a478df9935f
>> <https://github.com/jensl/llvm-project-20170507/commit/a00d5ce3f20bf1c7a41145be8b7a3a478df9935f>After
>> building clang and the plugin, you generate jumbo source files that look
>> like:jumbo_source_1.cc:#pragma jumbo#include
>> "real_source_file_1.cc"#include "real_source_file_2.cc"#include
>> "real_source_file_3.cc"Then, you compile something like this:clang++ -c
>> jumbo_source_1.cc -Xclang -load -Xclang lib/JumboSupport.so -Xclang
>> -add-plugin -Xclang jumbo-supportThe plugin gives unique names[3] to the
>> anonymous namespaces without otherwise changing their semantics, and also
>> #undef's macros defined in each top-level source file before processing the
>> next top-level source file.  That way header files can still define macros
>> that are used in multiple source files in the jumbo translation unit.
>> Collisions between macros defined in header files and names used in other
>> headers and other source files are still possible, but less likely.To show
>> how much these two changes help, here's a patch to make Chromium's network
>> code build in jumbo
>> mode:https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/966523
>> <https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/966523>
>> (+352/-377 lines)And here's the corresponding patch using the
>> proof-of-concept JumboSupport
>> plugin:https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/962062
>> <https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/962062> (+53/-52
>> lines)It seems clear that the version using the JumboSupport plugin would
>> require less effort to create, review and merge into the codebase.  We have
>> a few other feature ideas, but these two changes seem to do most of the
>> work for us.So now we're trying to figure out the best way forward- would a
>> feature like this be welcome to the Clang project?  And if so, how would
>> you recommend that we go about it? We would prefer to do this in a way that
>> does not require a locally patched Clang and could live with building a
>> custom plugin, although implementing this entirely in Clang would be even
>> better.Thanks,-Mostyn.[1] If you're not familiar with unity builds, the
>> idea is to compile multiple source files per compiler invocation, reducing
>> the overhead of processing header files (which can be surprisingly high).
>> We do this by taking a list of the source files in a target and generating
>> "jumbo" source files that #include multiple "real" source files, and then
>> we feed these jumbo files to the compiler one at a time.  This way, we
>> don't prevent the usage of valuable build tools like ccache and icecc that
>> only support a single source file on the command line.[2] Daniel Bratell
>> has a summary of our progress jumbo-ifying the Chromium codebase
>> here:https://docs.google.com/document/d/19jGsZxh7DX8jkAKbL1nYBa5rcByUL2EeidnYsoXfsYQ/edit#
>> <https://docs.google.com/document/d/19jGsZxh7DX8jkAKbL1nYBa5rcByUL2EeidnYsoXfsYQ/edit#>[3]
>> The JumboSupport plugin assigns names to the anonymous namespaces in a
>> given file:  foo::(anonymous namespace)::bar is replaced with a symbol name
>> of the form foo::__anonymous_<number>::bar where <number> is unique to the
>> file within the jumbo translation unit.  Due to the internal linkage of
>> these symbols, <number> does not need to be unique across multiple object
>> files/jumbo source files.*
>> --
>> Mostyn Bramley-Moore
>> Vewd Software
>> mostynb at vewd.com <mostynb at opera.com>
>> _______________________________________________
>> cfe-dev mailing list
>> cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org
>> http://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cfe-dev
>>
>
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