On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 10:29 AM, Patrick Walton <[email protected]> wrote: > On 1/6/13 9:50 AM, Lindsey Kuper wrote: >> >> What stands in the way of doing incremental compilation? > > > Personally, I think our time would be better spent making it easy to break > large projects up into multiple finer-grained crates. We should be able to > tell cargo and/or the work-in-progress `fbuild` workalike to compile a crate > and rebuild all of its dependent crates (if they were modified) in one > command. > > This strikes me as more reliable than incremental compilation, because crate > structure enforces a DAG. What worries me with incremental compilation is > that we'll do a lot of work to make it work, then we'll discover that in > practice intra-crate dependencies are so intertwined that most changes > result in a full rebuild anyway.
I think that it would be good to do an experiment to see whether or not that worry is justified, which is to say, printing out what the dependency graph is and seeing how modular is for rustc and perhaps other Rust crates. I put in some work towards doing this, but got derailed at some point. It's not particularly difficult, though, and then we could make an informed decision about whether or not to go down this path. A lot of the work for incremental compilation will likely also be useful for parallelizing the compiler. So I don't see it as a waste of time. Cheers, Tim -- Tim Chevalier * http://catamorphism.org/ * Often in error, never in doubt "Too much to carry, too much to let go Time goes fast, learning goes slow." -- Bruce Cockburn _______________________________________________ Rust-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/rust-dev
