[cfe-dev] Modules TS: any alternatives?

[David Blaikie via cfe-dev]

On Tue, Apr 30, 2019 at 6:01 AM via cfe-dev <cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
> Hi folks!
> Did anybody ever considered possible alternatives to modules TS?

A lot of discussion and design went into the modules TS and variants, yes.

> I mean per current modules TS, it looks like compiler should be a build system at same time, which is unusual..

The characterization of the compiler as a build system is one that
gets people a bit tetchy - though the underlying concerns about
transparency of parallelism, etc, are important to consider.

The directions being pursued by both Clang and GCC are intended to
avoid having the compiler orchestrate the work - to ensure that
parallel and distributed build systems can handle this sort of thing.

Clang already has two modes - one it's had a lot longer than Modules
TS (& in part was some of the inspiration for the TS) that is sort of
a nested build system where the compiler does orchestrate the
building, storage, and retrieval of the binary representation of
modules (this is used in XCode/on MacOS today & has been for a while
now). But also one where the compiler does none of this and relies on
the build system to have complete, explicit knowledge of dependencies,
to generate dependencies first, and to pass them to compilations that
need them (this is used at Google & has been for a few years)

But there is a desire for something in between - for build systems
that don't have total knowledge, but want greater parallelism/build
transparency than the implicit module can provide. Folks on Clang
(Apple folks have built a prototype import scanner of sorts that could
be run up-front to discover the module dependency graph) and GCC (the
GCC Modules TS prototype includes a callback service where the
compiler queries an arbitrary oracle (possibly implemented by the
build system) to state its module needs on-the-fly) are working on
approaches that provide this.

- Dave

>
> Thanks!
> Stepan Dyatkovskiy
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