Hi everyone, There's been a lot of traction recently about our builds getting slower and what we could do about it, and what not.
Starting with bug 904979, I would like to change the way we're thinking about default flags and options. And I am therefore opening a discussion about it. The main thing bug 904979 does is to make release engineering builds (as well as linux distros, palemoon, icecat, you name it) use a special --enable-release configure flag to use flags that we deem necessary for a build of Firefox, the product. The flip side is that builds without this flag, which matches builds from every developer, obviously, would use flags that make the build faster. For the moment, on Linux systems, this means disabling identical code folding and dead code removal (which, while they make the binary size smaller, increase link time), and forcing the use of the gold linker when it's available but is not system default. With bug 905646, it will mean enabling -gsplit-dwarf when it's available, which make link time on linux really very much faster (<4s on my machine instead of 30s). We could and should do the same kind of things for other platforms, with the goal of making linking libxul.so/xul.dll/XUL faster, making edit-compile-edit cycles faster. If that works reliably, for instance, we should for instance use incremental linking. Please feel free to file Core::Build Config bugs for what you think would help on your favorite build platform (and if you do, for better tracking, make them depend on bug 904979). That being said, this is not the discussion I want to have here, that was merely an introduction. The web has grown in the past few years, and so has our code base, to support new technologies. As Nathan noted on his blog[1] disabling webrtc calls for great build time improvements. And I think it's something we should address by a switch in strategy. - How many people are working on webrtc code? - How many people are working on peripheral code that may affect webrtc? - How many people are building webrtc code they're not working on and not using? I'm fairly certain the answer to the above is that the latter population is much bigger than the other two, by probably more than an order of magnitude. So here's the discussion opener: why not make things like webrtc (I'm sure we can find many more[2]) opt-in instead of opt-out, for local, developer builds? What do you think are good candidates for such a switch? Mike 1. https://blog.mozilla.org/nfroyd/2013/08/15/better-build-times-through-configury/ 2. and we can already start with ICU, because it's built and not even used. And to add injury to pain, it's currently built without parallelism (and the patch to make it not do so was backed out). _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
