Re: [PATCH 09/12] use a shell function for AC_CHECK_TYPE

[Paolo Bonzini]

Eric Blake wrote:
> According to Paolo Bonzini on 11/1/2008 11:54 AM:
>> I must say I don't like it much, unless it gives a net improvement of at
>> least 2-3% on coreutils, say.  But I disagree on the math: doesn't it
>> save only one cat *but also* one rm?
> 
> It takes two cat's per AC_LANG_CONFTEST to build conftest.$ac_ext, so by
> building it once instead of twice we save two processes.  But each
> AC_COMPILE_IFELSE does an rm of all built files, and if AC_LANG_CONFTEST
> was not run, we must add an extra 'rm -f conftest.$ac_ext' after the
> compile test, explaining the added rm.

Right, I was still thinking in terms of my first functionization patches.

By a completely different approach, would it make sense to switch from
cat to AS_ECHO in order to build the conftest.c files?  That would save
forks for *all* tests...

Paolo