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Android ICS Will Require 16GB RAM To Compile
ozmanjusri writes "New smartphones may be lightweight, compact objects, but their OSs are anything but. Ice Cream Sandwich will need workstations with no less than 16 GB RAM to build the source code, twice the amount Gingerbread needed. It will take 5 hours to compile on a dual quad-core 2+GHz workstation, and need 80GB disk space for all AOSP configs. Android developers are also being warned to be cautious of undocumented APIs: 'In almost every case, there's only one reason for leaving APIs undocumented: We're not sure that what we have now is the best solution, and we think we might have to improve it, and we're not prepared to make those commitments to testing and preservation. We're not claiming that they're "Private" or "Secret" — How could they be, when anyone in the world can discover them? We're also not claiming they're forbidden: If you use them, your code will compile and probably run.'"
Nobody will ever need more than 16GB...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I mean, you can spend $100 and buy a 16-inch horse cock dildo, but that doesn't mean you can shove the whole thing up your ass.
While Android will remain open-source, eventually it will require so much RAM/processing power/etc. to compile that only Google will have the computational resources available to compile it.
Clever!
Quick question for those with giant codebases such as this. How the heck do you test, and debug the software with those kind of lag times? Do you split everything up into smaller pieces or something? If so, then surely there are cases where you need to test something that requires EVERYTHING to be compiled. I can imagine such shot in the dark scenarios to be the stuff of pure nightmares.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
16GB RAM recommended, more preferred, anything less will measurably benefit from using an SSD.
Emphasis mine. Still pretty beast, though.
I mean, you can spend $100 and buy a 16-inch horse cock dildo
I'll leave that to you. Interesting that you knew the price off the top of your head, though.
Unless the build system is screwed up, recompiling after a change should be relatively fast. Usually source code is stored as lots of smaller files, and each file is compiled separately to produce a separate object file (e.g., .o). Then next time a rebuild is requested, the system should notice what changed, and only rebuild the needed parts. Some parts take the same time each time (e.g., a final link), but it shouldn't take anywhere near the same amount of time.
There are lots of build tools, including make, cmake, and so on. If you use the venerable "make" tool, you might want to read Miller's "Recursive Make Considered Harmful":
http://aegis.sourceforge.net/auug97.pdf
Cue the lovers and haters of "make", here :-).
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
TFA: "5+ hours of CPU time for a single build, 25+ minutes of wall time, as measured on a workstation (dual-E5620 i.e. 2x quad-core 2.4GHz HT, with 24GB of RAM, no SSD)."
/. Summary: "It will take 5 hours to compile on a dual quad-core 2+GHz workstation"
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
While it is a lot of RAM compared to what many system have, it really isn't a big deal these days. 4GB DDR3 sticks are $25 or less each, and that is for high quality RAM. Regular, consumer grade, LGA1155 boards support 4 of them. So for $100 you can have 16GB on a normal desktop system. My home system I type this on has 16GB for that reason. It was so cheap I decided "Why not?"
They actually can support more, with 8GB chips you can have 32GB on a standard desktop, but those are still expensive.
The enthusiast X79 LGA2011 boards coming out will have 8 sockets and thus handle 64GB. Of course beyond that there's workstation which cost a lot more, but not as much as you might first think.
At any rate, 16GB is now a "regular desktop" amount of RAM. Standard boards the likes of which you get in cheap ($1000 or less) towers support that much, and it only costs $100 to get. It is quite a realistic thing to require, for something high end.
No, you can perform better optimizations if you know, for instance, that a function can be inlined. You can't get that if some of the uses are in other compilation units.
-Bucky
Unless the build system is screwed up, recompiling after a change should be relatively fast. Usually source code is stored as lots of smaller files [...] Then next time a rebuild is requested, the system should notice what changed, and only rebuild the needed parts.
I feel your pain brother.
This article would be shocking, but considering that 16 GB of memory -- especially the dual-channel DDR3 used for the i5 and consumer i7's -- is so cheap, less than $100, this article doesn't have any shock value. It's just informative. It's letting us know the 'recommended' memory and giving more nerds an excuse to add more RAM. That is the NERDS that don't already have 24 gigs for their virtual machines. :P
Now if "compile" refers to the entire build process, then we're also probably talking about some serious static analysis. Checking for things like "can this function ever throw?" or "is this code reachable?" or "is the memory allocated here always eventually freed?" also requires an awful lot of context to check. In the worst case each of these questions requires knowing all of the code to answer.