12 ms·

There are all sorts of scenarios where ccache is a major accelerant. “make clean && make” is the easiest way to force a rebuild all, with relink, and ccache wil

There are all sorts of scenarios where ccache is a major accelerant. “make clean && make” is the easiest way to force a rebuild all, with relink, and ccache will supply the object files quite fast. You may also be switching back and forth between debug and release builds; again, ccache keeps the penalty low. Finally if you run configure scripts, all those “checking for printf…” messages are the configure script generating and compiling tiny C programs invoking those functions to make sure the compiler can find them. ccache can therefore shave a significant percentage of time off running configure scripts, which is welcome.

Cloudef 4y ago
Ah the configure scripts and large c++ codebases, the bane of fast compile times. Configure scripts "checking useless stuff" isn't parallelized so it takes ages, even on a modern beefy processor. Somebody should write ccache-like thing just for autoconfigure, so it can instantly feed answer to those checks once it has once run and cached the result, maybe this could even be part of ccache (I don't mean just the preprocessing part, but whole thing).
- JNRowe 4y ago
  Many years ago there was confcache¹, that for a time was integrated in to portage via a FEATURES flag for Gentoo users. It wasn't particularly useful in the general case, and never really worked that well in practice. I don't recall the idea really taking off anywhere else, and I can't remember when it finally disappeared in Gentoo either(but it was a looooong time ago). It was strictly a cache, it didn't run parallel checks or make any other attempts to improve the run time. ¹ The only source I've found right now is https://github.com/fxttr/confcache https://github.com/fxttr/confcache
- jonstewart 4y ago
  It’d be great to have a notbraindeadautoconf that just deleted the macros for the bog standard autoconf macros, checking for compilers and cstdlib and posix functions, and then invoked autoconf to work over the actual logic of configure.ac. It’s 2022, we don’t need to worry about SunOS and Ultrix and AIX and their broken compilers.
- fatneckbeardz 4y ago
  why i prefer modern languages number 800.. no autoconf. (rust, go)

Cloudef 4y ago

Ah the configure scripts and large c++ codebases, the bane of fast compile times. Configure scripts "checking useless stuff" isn't parallelized so it takes ages, even on a modern beefy processor. Somebody should write ccache-like thing just for autoconfigure, so it can instantly feed answer to those checks once it has once run and cached the result, maybe this could even be part of ccache (I don't mean just the preprocessing part, but whole thing).

JNRowe 4y ago
Many years ago there was confcache¹, that for a time was integrated in to portage via a FEATURES flag for Gentoo users. It wasn't particularly useful in the general case, and never really worked that well in practice. I don't recall the idea really taking off anywhere else, and I can't remember when it finally disappeared in Gentoo either(but it was a looooong time ago). It was strictly a cache, it didn't run parallel checks or make any other attempts to improve the run time. ¹ The only source I've found right now is https://github.com/fxttr/confcache https://github.com/fxttr/confcache
jonstewart 4y ago
It’d be great to have a notbraindeadautoconf that just deleted the macros for the bog standard autoconf macros, checking for compilers and cstdlib and posix functions, and then invoked autoconf to work over the actual logic of configure.ac. It’s 2022, we don’t need to worry about SunOS and Ultrix and AIX and their broken compilers.
fatneckbeardz 4y ago
why i prefer modern languages number 800.. no autoconf. (rust, go)