[m-dev.] Improving compilation time?

[Julien Fischer]

On Wed, 17 Aug 2011, Peter Wang wrote:

> On 2011-08-17, Paul Bone <pbone at csse.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>> On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 02:27:25PM +0200, Magnus Holm wrote:
>>> I'm a complete noob when it comes to both the language and the
>>> implementation of Mercury, but one thing is clear: Mercury desperately
>>> needs to improve the compilation-time in order to be more
>>> attractive/useful to other developers. It's just a painful experience
>>> to compile it from source.
>>>
>>> So many decisions, so many hours to re-compile it:
>>
>> I've answered many of your questions specifically, however the general answer
>> is that large projects take a long time to compile.  People rarely complain
>> about having to compile Firefox, which probably takes longer to compile than
>> Mercury.  They rarely complain about compiling large projects because they
>> rarely have to because many projects make binary distributions and packages for
>> various distributions available.  Which is what we should be doing, and
>> something I'd like to have the time to do :-).
>>
>> I hope that the answers below can help in the short term and that one day I
>> finish the Mercury packages for Debian and that they can help in the long-term.
>
> Why can't we just tar up an installation every night?

Each of the test hosts already does tar up it builds very night.  We no
longer upload them to the FTP server -- I don't remember whether that's
deliberate or simply due to bitrot in the test_mercury script.

> Incompatible gcc versions?

Among other things.  I've nevery found the binary tarballs to be
terribly reliable in the past.  (Basing such packages on the hlc.gc
grades rather than the low-level C grades tends to improve things -- 
indeed that's what I do for the Mercury compiler included with the G12
binary packages.)

Julien.
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