Marco van de Voort wrote:
But even when in theory (which I btw don't even want to consider), you are
equivalent to C in this way, it basically means disabling the unit system,
and users must start to manual maintain dependencies, and learn to
interpretate cryptic errormessages if an incremental build goes haywire.
C users and developers are trained in this, and have their experience in
detangling the web of deps etc, have developed semi-automated helper tools
etc.
Inflicting this on the Pascal masses is unrealistic and undesirable.
Sticking to the manual build principles because the FPC devels can handle it
essentially means that nobody else will have parallel builds, or will resort
to a system of doing full builds only. (but that is throwing away the big
savings to gain small ones). Something that big C projects resort to anyway,
I'm told.
And FPC even only in a few critical points.
Manual maintenance is simply too painful (and atypical for modular languages and
its users).
But on the other hand, if an application programmer could disable FPC's
unit handling and use make -j instead, choosing to pay the price of
difficult maintenance, it might defuse the criticism coming from certain
quarters.
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
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