My previous look at SCons performance compared SCons and gmake on a variety of build scenarios — full, incremental, and clean. A few people suggested that I try the tips given on the SCons ‘GoFastButton’ wiki page, which are said to significantly improve SCons performance (at the cost of some accuracy, of course). Naturally, I [Read More →]
GNU make 3.82 hit the streets last week, the first new release of the workhouse build tool in over four years. Why so long between releases? To me the answer is obvious: the tool Just Works ™, so there’s no need to churn out new releases chasing the latest development fad. But as this release [Read More →]
UPDATE: In response to comments here and elsewhere, I’ve done another series of SCons builds using the tips on the SCons ‘GoFastButton’ wiki page. You can view the results here A few months ago, I took a look at the scalability of SCons, a popular Python-based build tool. The results were disappointing, to say the [Read More →]
Here’s the thing about high performance: you can’t just bolt it on at the end. It’s got to be baked in from day one. No doubt those of you who are experienced developers are now invoking the venerable Donald Knuth, who once said, “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” But look at it [Read More →]
One challenge that we’ve faced at Electric Cloud is how to verify that our makefile parser correctly emulates GNU Make. We started by generating test cases based on a close reading of the gmake manual. Then we turned to real-world examples: makefiles from dozens of open source projects and from our customers. After several years [Read More →]
Like any system that has evolved over many years, GNU Make is rife with appendages of questionable utility. One area this is especially noticeable is the collection of built-in rules in gmake. These rules make it possible to do things like compile a C source file to an executable without even having a makefile, or [Read More →]
Nobody would ever claim that GNU Make is a general purpose programming language, but with a little work, we can coerce it into generating Fibonacci numbers for us. Why bother? Because we can.
I recently wrote an article for CM Crossroads exploring various strategies for handling rules that generate multiple output files in GNU make. If you’ve ever struggled with this problem, you should check out the article. I don’t want to spoil the exciting conclusion, but it turns out that the only way to really correctly capture [Read More →]
ElectricAccelerator vs distcc – samba reloaded In an earlier post I compared the performance of ElectricAcclerator and distcc by building samba using each tool in turn on the same cluster. In that test I found that Accelerator bested distcc at suitably high levels of parallelism, but that distcc narrowly beat Accelerator at lower levels of [Read More →]
If you’ve been using GNU make for some time, you are probably familiar with both pattern rules and target-specific variables. You may even be familiar with the intersection of these features: pattern-specific variables. But you may not be aware of a subtle change in gmake 3.81 which affects the processing of pattern-specific variables with potentially [Read More →]
