Re: [boost] Scons users?

From: Kevin Wheatley (hxpro_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-09-20 11:41:32

Erk!

now I didn't expect that kind of response... appologies, I was simply
sending an FYI...

In my experience of Noel's approach to things is that if something
that is said in the blog is wrong then you'll get an update indicating
so and why. Now you might be right saying that people doing such tests
might like to contact the originaors of the tools to check if anything
is wrong with their tests, but most users don't do that, so in someway
it is fair to test without doing so - I think I'd be more inclined to
contact first, then publish but thats me.

As far as I am concerned his results pretty much match my experience
broadly speaking, although I have not compared exact like for like,
I've found that make out runs most of the other systems I've used
(bjam with Boost Build v1, VS6, VS7.1, etc) by some order of magnitude
(on Linux/IRIX mostly).

Incremental builds as far as I am concrned are important as I'm a
semi-TDD sort of guy. I write a test, change some code and
compile+test. This means you can't afford to not cache dependancy data
for instance, also starting up lots of processes is a bad idea.
Parallel builds are really important too. If you could throw in a
distcc/ccache effect then I'm happy.

I suspect that my experience with bjam (building boost mostly) is
hampered by my use of NFS mounted boost code, I belive somebody else
mentioned this earlier, but I do the same for make too, the effect
there is less of problem.

Perhaps the issues are one of recomended ways of doing things for
efficiency vs ease of use. Is there a recomendation of how to layout
systems so that you can consider smaller sets of dependencies for
instance

However something good has come of it, I know that naming lots of
files the same thing is probably not a good idea for Boost build - not
something I'd be likly todo except in automatically generated
tests/etc. Suggests some kind of hash map or tree search followed by
a linear list data structure maybe?

Kevin

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