Re: Precompiled include files
- Posted by mattlewis (admin) Aug 12, 2013
- 1357 views
It does seem to me, though, that the Translator can be at least as smart as Make when it comes to which files have been modified.
This was tried, and I think there are still some remnants in the translator source from this effort. If we were doing a simple translation to C, it would probably be fairly easy. However, the translator itself does a fair amount of optimization, which includes getting rid of unused code. This feeds into other optimizations. So we can't just look at when that file has changed. We also have to know if anything has changed about the way it's being used.
So, for instance, if we know that a certain function is only called with a particular value, we can replace the variable with the value constant (assuming it's an integer) and we reduce run time tests and entire code branches. The C compiler does its own optimizations, too.
This all means that we may speed up translation (done once) at the expense of slower run times and larger executables. Ultimately, we dropped the idea.
Matt
