Build process is slow to start

[camthesaxman]

When running 'make' to rebuild the project after changing a single file (or when not even changing anything), it takes almost a whole minute before it starts compiling. This makes it rather annoying when trying to test my C code against the disassembly. I presume this is due to the massive amount of dependencies that Make has to keep track of and checking the timestamp on the thousands of files in the graphics directory takes some time.

[RevoSucks]

Specs?

time make -j16 from make clean results in:

real    2m17.331s
user    1m26.897s
sys     4m53.771s

I don't see a "minute delay" when updating pokeruby.

[ghost]

It takes around 4 seconds to run make if I haven't made any changes on my machine, after the first time I've run it. It's slower the first time, though.

If you want to modify the code but not any of the graphics, you could consider using a modified makefile that doesn't scan the asm files for dependencies.

[camthesaxman]

This is on my old Pentium 4 desktop (Yeah, I refuse to let it go). Most of the time is dominated by disk activity from scaninc which seems to recursively scan the .s files every time make is invoked. I've put in a rule in my custom Makefile to build .s files from .c files, so I can type "make src/foo.s" and instantly have it compile foo.c into foo.s with no delay.

[ghost]

Good idea.

[camthesaxman]

I've noticed that even when trying to compile a single C file, for example, make src/wallclock.o VERSION=RUBY, make runs scaninc on all of the .s files in data, even though wallclock.o should not depend on any of those files. Scaninc recursively scans the files, and on a slow hard disk, this can take up to 10 seconds, doing something totally pointless. I don't know enough about make to debug why it's pulling dependencies from there, but nothing in src should depend on anything in data at all.

[yenatch]

make NODEP=1

[ghost]

NODEP solves this issue.

[RevoSucks]

NODEP only solves it if you are making changes to just the assembly or programming and not changing any header files. If you are doing anything else, you still need to wait.

[ghost]

Not much can be done about that, except for caching the dependencies, possibly.

[yenatch]

You still have to stat the files, which isn't exactly fast. Ideally you could listen for filesystem changes (eg linux inotify or windows System.IO.FileSystemWatcher) instead.