Blog FeedI’ve heard it said that the best programmer is a lazy programmer. I’ve always taken that to mean that the best programmers avoid unnecessary work, by working smarter and not harder; and that they focus on building only those features that are really required now, not allowing speculative work to distract them.
I wouldn’t presume to call myself a great programmer, but I definitely hate doing unnecessary work. That’s why the concept of build avoidance is so intriguing. If you’ve spent any time on the build speed problem, you’ve probably come across this term. Unfortunately it’s been conflated with the single technique implemented by tools like ccache and ClearCase winkins. I say “unfortunate” for two reasons: first, those tools don’t really work all that well, at least not for individual developers; and second, the technique they employ is not really build avoidance at all, but rather object reuse. But by co-opting the term build avoidance and associating it with such lackluster results, many people have become dismissive of build avoidance.
Subbuilds are a more literal, and more effective, approach to build avoidance: reduce build time by building only the stuff required for your active component. Don’t waste time building the stuff that’s not related to what you’re working on now. It seems so obvious I’m almost embarrassed to be explaining it. But the payoff is anything but embarrassing. On my project, after making changes to one of the prerequisites libraries for the application I’m working on, a regular incremental takes 10 minutes; a subbuild incremental takes just 77 seconds:
| Standard incremental: |
609s
|
| Subbuild incremental: |
77s
|
Not bad! Read on for more about how subbuilds work and how you can get SparkBuild, a free gmake- and NMAKE-compatible build tool, so you can try subbuilds yourself.
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