[m-dev.] build speed

[Fergus Henderson]

On 08-Jun-2000, Shawn Vincent <svincent at svincent.com> wrote:
> 
> Anyway, where I'm at is:  I downloaded the snapshot to play around
> with it, and compiled it.  It took a very long time to compile.  I
> thought:  "that's ok, there's a makefile and stuff, so it doesn't
> matter too much how long a complete compile takes".  I changed a file
> slightly and recompiled.  It took about the same amount of time.
> 
> It strikes me that the Mercury team probably doesn't wait for a quarter
> hour each time they make a change, so I must be doing something 
> horribly wrong.  Ideas? I'm now running a Pentium Pro 180 with 
> lots (maybe 128M) of memory.  I have access to faster machines 
> at work, if that's all it is.

It should not take the same amount of time for a recompilation,
unless you changed the interface of one of the commonly used
modules (e.g. list.m).  You should be able to see from the output
which files it is recompiling; is it recompiling everything,
or just the module that you changed?

Things you can do to improve (re)compilation speed:

	- Make sure to use Linux rather than Windows

	- Make sure that you do the compilation on a local
	  file system rather than a network file system

	- Put "MCFLAGS = -O0" in a file named Mmake.params
	  (in the top-level directory, i.e. the same directory as configure.in).

	- Add "LIBRARY_INTERMODULE = no" to Mmake.params
	  [the drawback with this is that "mmake install" won't work
	  in the library directory]

	- Rather than invoking "make" or "mmake" from the top-level directory,
	  invoke it from the `compiler' directory, if you've only changed
	  files in that directory

> Once I figure all this out, I'm probably going to do a checkout from CVS,
> maybe?

Yes, that's probably a good idea.

> Oh: it strikes me that perhaps there is a more appropriate place
> to be asking questions like this.  Is there a mailing list of some
> sort I should be on?

Yes, mercury-developers at cs.mu.oz.au;
send mail to mercury-developers-request at cs.mu.oz.au with "subscribe"
in the body to subscribe.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3        |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
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