Seems reasonable in principle. I wouldn't want a hard dependency on Eclipse though; you should be able to get incremental compiles without it.
I think it should work by watching the filesystem for changes and doing dependency analysis to only build what's necessary after a file changed. One question: is the IncrementalGenerator API still how we want things to work? If so, finishing the job of converting generators to it will help. - Brian On Wednesday, December 12, 2012 8:18:15 PM UTC-8, Stephen Haberman wrote: > > Hey, > > Since Thomas brought up changes to dev mode, I've been thinking about > how to implement an incremental dev mode. > > After playing with SuperDevMode, it is better (no extensions/etc.), but > AFAICT it still starts over from "let's build a ResourceOracle", "now > let's build a TypeOracle", etc. > > Seems like we should be able to reuse ResourceOracle, TypeOracle, etc., > instances across compiles. And really, have the notion of invoking GWT > dev mode compiles go away altogether. E.g. hook into Eclipse, and > during auto builds have the JS files on disk just magically get updated > after each save. > > I've been spiking an Eclipse plugin, which seems not as hard as I > thought it would be, which incrementally generates .jribble files > as .java/.class files change, with the idea of not embedding ecj > anymore. That's a slightly separate topic though. > > The only thing that seems impossible with incremental compiles is > preserving the semantics that code generators see--currently they are > very deterministic/batch, and this would change all of that. But for > the better, I think. > > (It would invert how GWT currently works--it's a batch system that > sometimes we force (badly) to be incremental, to being an incremental > system which sometimes you could run in batch (on the CLI).) > > Does this seem terribly egregious? I think if it worked, it would > result in dramatic productivity improvements--the goal would be > "faster than coffeescript" (or whatever) compiles, and truly instant > refreshes after making changes. > > - Stephen > -- http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit-Contributors
