[llvm-dev] Who wants faster LLVM/Clang builds?

[Mikhail Zolotukhin via llvm-dev]

Hi,

Recently I've done some experiments on the LLVM/Clang code and discovered that many of our source files often include unnecessary header files. I wrote a simple tool that eliminates redundant includes and estimates benefits of doing it, and the results were quite nice: for some files we were able to save 90% of compile time! I think we want to apply some of the cleanups I found, but I'm not sure how to better do it: the total patches are 8k lines of code for LLVM and 3k lines of code for clang (I'll attach them for reference). My suggestion would be that people take a look at the list of changed files and pick the changes for the piece of code they are working on if the changes look sane (the changes do need some checking before committing). Does it sound like a good idea? I'd appreciate any feedback on what can we do here.

The list of files for which removing redundant headers improved compile time (the numbers are compile time in seconds for a Debug build):

LLVM top 10
Filename						Old	New	Delta
lib/CodeGen/GlobalISel/GlobalISel.cpp			0.26	0.02	-91.9%
lib/MC/MCLabel.cpp					0.19	0.02	-88.2%
tools/llvm-readobj/ObjDumper.cpp			0.43	0.10	-76.5%
lib/MC/MCWinEH.cpp					0.51	0.13	-74.3%
lib/Transforms/Vectorize/Vectorize.cpp			0.72	0.29	-59.7%
tools/llvm-diff/DiffLog.cpp				0.58	0.26	-54.6%
lib/Target/ARM/MCTargetDesc/ARMMachORelocationInfo.cpp	0.46	0.26	-44.1%
lib/DebugInfo/DWARF/DWARFExpression.cpp			0.68	0.38	-43.3%
lib/LTO/LTOModule.cpp					2.25	1.33	-41.1%
lib/Target/TargetMachine.cpp				1.76	1.10	-37.8%

Full list:



Clang top 10
Filename						Old	New	Delta
tools/libclang/CXString.cpp				1.70	0.25	-85.2%
lib/Tooling/CommonOptionsParser.cpp			1.69	0.55	-67.3%
lib/AST/StmtViz.cpp					1.02	0.44	-57.4%
tools/driver/cc1_main.cpp				2.26	0.97	-57.1%
unittests/CodeGen/BufferSourceTest.cpp			3.08	1.83	-40.6%
lib/CodeGen/CGLoopInfo.cpp				1.91	1.34	-29.9%
unittests/Tooling/RefactoringActionRulesTest.cpp	2.46	1.79	-27.0%
unittests/CodeGen/CodeGenExternalTest.cpp		3.43	2.52	-26.5%
tools/libclang/CXStoredDiagnostic.cpp			1.67	1.26	-24.8%
tools/clang-func-mapping/ClangFnMapGen.cpp		2.48	1.89	-23.8%

Full list:


The corresponding patches (careful, they are big):


Methodology
My tool took the compile_commands.json from LLVM build and  iterated over files trying to remove redundant headers. To find which header files could be removed it scanned the file for "#include" lines and tried to remove them one by one (checking if the file still compiles after the removal). When there were no more include lines to remove, we verified the change with ninja+ninja check. After it we compared preprocessed file size before and after the change hoping to see that it dropped and then checked the compile time impact.
NB: As a side effect of this approach we removed all include-lines from inactive "ifdef" sections, which means that the patches *will* break other configurations if applied as-is.

Thanks,
Michael
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20171205/981e50d6/attachment-0005.html>
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: llvm.txt
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20171205/981e50d6/attachment-0002.txt>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20171205/981e50d6/attachment-0006.html>
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: clang.txt
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20171205/981e50d6/attachment-0003.txt>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20171205/981e50d6/attachment-0007.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: llvm_redundant_headers.patch
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 293711 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20171205/981e50d6/attachment-0002.obj>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20171205/981e50d6/attachment-0008.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: clang_redundant_headers.patch
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 117203 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20171205/981e50d6/attachment-0003.obj>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20171205/981e50d6/attachment-0009.html>