SCons build tool speed

[Mike Meyer]

Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> writes:

> ted wrote:
>> How does the speed of the Scons build tool compare with Ant? Right
>> now with out Ant builds take around an hour. Hoping to speed that up.
>
> Don't tools like Scons, Ant, and for that matter "make" just
> execute other programs?  So that 99% of the time is consumed
> external to the Scons, Ant, or make process itself?  Why
> do you think the speed of the build tool is of any significance
> compared to the time for things like compilers and linkers
> to execute?

Actually, these tools do a number of things oter than run other
programs. For instance, they parse input files to construct a build
tree, walk the build tree figuring out what needs to be rebuilt, and
only *then* do they get around to executing those other
programs. Assuming that the work prior to running those other programs
is "neglible" can lead to some truly atrocious build-time behavior. In
fact, one major advantage that ant/scons/jam/etc. have over Make is
that they avoid the defacto standard "recursive make" build
system. See <URL:
http://www.pcug.org.au/~millerp/rmch/recu-make-cons-harm.html > for
details on that.

        <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.