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Distributed Compilation
BagOBones writes "Tired of waiting for your source to compile? Dreaming of having your own cluster and having something useful to do with it? Well Trolltech might have the answer. Trolltech Teambuilder lets you turn your network into a clustered C/C++ compiler."
Maybe its just me, but $750 for a farm size of 5 seems kinda pricey for a few moments saved here and there. At my job, we have pretty speedy machines, and almost nothing we have built has taken more than 10 min for a complete recompile. And since you rarely recompile everything, its usually a couple seconds to a minute to compile your changes. I can't imagine that this would speed that up enough to justify the price.
use an interpreter. (Okay, it is not new. I lied.)
BTW, is there "lint"-like utilities for any scripting/interpreted languages that detects "suspicious" stuff before running?
This may help one get the best of both worlds.
I personally prefer interpreted languages. They are usually easier to read IMO because there is less formality in the way.
Interpreted languages attempt to reduce problems by making the view clearer, while compiled languages attempt reduce problems by using a fatter air-bag.
It is sort of like chosing between a fighter plane that is highly menueverable by being light, or one that is heavily armored. They are both different strategies to the same goal. The choice often depends on the pilot and training.
Table-ized A.I.
That way, if someone has already built the file you're about to build, it's just a copy. Even better is if you have a continous build script caching results ahead of time for you.
It has worked pretty well for me so far.
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
What about {open}Mosix cluster?
o rge.net/
http://www.mosix.org/
http://openmosix.sourcef
Program compilation is not an obvious candidate for parallelization because it is an extremely memory intensive process. So to do this right you'd need very fast communication between your CPUs.
However, what Trolltech is probably doing, is farming out the independant bits of your program that you would link together in the end anyway. That might really help on rebuilding the entire project at once. However, if your program is set up well, you usually only need to recompile one file at a time.
So the times when you could see the biggest speed up in compilation, you will need this least.
Sure. OTOH, the project I work on has well over a million lines of C++ code in it, about five developers full time, and a pretty tidy OO design is used to model much of our stuff. If you're playing with a new feature, this quite often goes into a base class to add it across a whole range of areas of the code, and changing the wrong header file can cause a good 10-15 minutes of rebuild (the whole project on a fast machine takes ~1hr). It's the sort of thing that's not normally a problem, but if you do it 10 times in a day while trying to fix that nagging bug, and you're shipping within the week so time is of the essence, then this sort of functionality is priceless. I guess the kind of team where I work is (aside from developing under Windoze) exactly the sort of place they're targetting. To our clients paying a significant sum of money per hour for our time, the $750 to save several hours at crunch time is nothing.
(And before anyone mentions it, yes, I'm aware of the Cheshire Cat idiom and such, thanks. They aren't in common use on the project, which dates from several years ago, and retrofitting them would be difficult to do without a lot of risk. It's cheaper and safer to just speed up build resources, by using faster PCs or something like the product in question here.)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.