Re: Getting to a release, an interim update, and why this is so hard
- Posted by ghaberek (admin) Aug 27, 2019
- 1226 views
As developers many of you (pardon me) are too concerned about the time it takes for compiling. Ultimately, it is the finished application e.g. "a payroll system" written in Euphoria, compiled and presented to the business community as an "executable" for doing their payroll every week. It is that time that matters , NOT your time in waiting for the compiler to finish compiling.
I'm pretty sure that Irv's comment was directly related to the "start up" time the interpreter takes to read all its files, convert them to intermediate language, and begin executing. The Raspberry Pi uses cheap flash storage, which is slow, and a tiny ARM CPU, which is slow, and cheap memory chips, which are slow so any effort to that results in slower "start up" time will be more apparent to users on those systems. We should, at best, work to improve those times and at worst, not do anything that will slow it down.
The time requirement for compiling large systems directly affects how frequently developers are willing to push out releases. Compiling for a proper release takes more than just the code-to-executable time. There's unit testing, manual testing, documentation, packaging, distribution, etc. Currently on my system it takes ~30 minutes round trip through a cycle of "make a change" "do a clean build" and "check the unit test results" -- so on any given evening I can really only change-and-test half a dozen things before it's time for bed. That makes compile time worthy of concern IMHO.
-Greg
