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Advice is to contribute to Chromium, fixing 50 bugs over the course of a year or so. Might not be an easy path though, personally when I tried to compile Chromi

by ximeng 16y ago

Advice is to contribute to Chromium, fixing 50 bugs over the course of a year or so. Might not be an easy path though, personally when I tried to compile Chromium, it took my PC 8 hours compiling before coming up with a fatal error. Been thinking about getting EC2 instances to compile it, has anyone tried that? Software license costs for Visual Studio put me off a bit.

wyclif 16y ago
Been thinking about getting EC2 instances to compile it, has anyone tried that? Sounds like a good idea to me, esp. for people working on a laptop.
Tichy 16y ago
You can download a compiled version :-) Seriously, do you have to compile the whole program for every code change? I suspect that is not necessary?
- jerf 16y ago
  This is merely one of many questions you will end up learning the answer to if you pursue this program.
- cosgroveb 16y ago
  My guess is that you only have to compile the build target that your code change was part of... you can build just Chrome, or just unit tests, or whatever else is part of the package... Also a common way to speed up build times is to build in release mode.
- spudlyo 16y ago
  No. That's why make(1) exists. You do usually have to compile everything once though.
ekidd 16y ago
Might not be an easy path though, personally when I tried to compile Chromium, it took my PC 8 hours compiling before coming up with a fatal error. Welcome to software development. :-) Seriously, I probably spend at least 10% of my time dealing with broken libraries, badly documented build processes, and other depressing obstacles. If you can get past these kinds of problems—and more importantly, if you submit fixes to spare the next person the pain—then you'll make a great developer.
technomancy 16y ago
Compiling Chromium crashed my box by overheating it. Definitely not a newbie-friendly project as so much of it is implemented in C++. While Mozilla's build may be equally terrifying, at least they have the good sense to implement good portions of the UI in Javascript.
- riprock 16y ago
  Out of curiosity what are the specs of your box? If anyone else can answer, I'm also curious what kind of box you need to safely compile a huge project like Chromium.
  - heresy 16y ago
    Took a bit under an hour on my machine. Core i7, 12GB of RAM, 10k RPM HDDs. The built executable worked first time too, which was impressive for a project of that size, given that it was the very latest bleeding edge trunk source code. For comparison, I tried to build Mozilla three or four years ago, and gave up. The Chrome build environment setup instructions, while long and tedious (especially on Windows), are excellent.
  - technomancy 16y ago
    It was on my 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo laptop. I ended up able to compile it by putting my laptop next to a large fan, but it was pretty ridiculous. The worst part was that I had to perform this whole song and dance just because I wanted to change some key bindings. (Using Alt+number to change between tabs like every other Linux program.) This serves as a nice textbook example of why implementing things like menus and keyboard shortcuts by hardcoding keycodes in C++ is a horrible idea.

by ximeng 16y ago

wyclif 16y ago

Been thinking about getting EC2 instances to compile it, has anyone tried that? Sounds like a good idea to me, esp. for people working on a laptop.

Tichy 16y ago

You can download a compiled version :-) Seriously, do you have to compile the whole program for every code change? I suspect that is not necessary?

jerf 16y ago
This is merely one of many questions you will end up learning the answer to if you pursue this program.
cosgroveb 16y ago
My guess is that you only have to compile the build target that your code change was part of... you can build just Chrome, or just unit tests, or whatever else is part of the package... Also a common way to speed up build times is to build in release mode.
spudlyo 16y ago
No. That's why make(1) exists. You do usually have to compile everything once though.

ekidd 16y ago

Might not be an easy path though, personally when I tried to compile Chromium, it took my PC 8 hours compiling before coming up with a fatal error. Welcome to software development. :-) Seriously, I probably spend at least 10% of my time dealing with broken libraries, badly documented build processes, and other depressing obstacles. If you can get past these kinds of problems—and more importantly, if you submit fixes to spare the next person the pain—then you'll make a great developer.

technomancy 16y ago

Compiling Chromium crashed my box by overheating it. Definitely not a newbie-friendly project as so much of it is implemented in C++. While Mozilla's build may be equally terrifying, at least they have the good sense to implement good portions of the UI in Javascript.

riprock 16y ago
Out of curiosity what are the specs of your box? If anyone else can answer, I'm also curious what kind of box you need to safely compile a huge project like Chromium.
- heresy 16y ago
  Took a bit under an hour on my machine. Core i7, 12GB of RAM, 10k RPM HDDs. The built executable worked first time too, which was impressive for a project of that size, given that it was the very latest bleeding edge trunk source code. For comparison, I tried to build Mozilla three or four years ago, and gave up. The Chrome build environment setup instructions, while long and tedious (especially on Windows), are excellent.
- technomancy 16y ago
  It was on my 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo laptop. I ended up able to compile it by putting my laptop next to a large fan, but it was pretty ridiculous. The worst part was that I had to perform this whole song and dance just because I wanted to change some key bindings. (Using Alt+number to change between tabs like every other Linux program.) This serves as a nice textbook example of why implementing things like menus and keyboard shortcuts by hardcoding keycodes in C++ is a horrible idea.