[Tinycc-devel] "incremental" compilation

[Mitchell N Charity]

Given the recent discussion of precompiled headers, I thought I'd
mention an experiment I did some time ago.

As a timing experiment, I took an old libtcc, added a kludged incremental
version of tcc_compile_string, and a tcc_copy().  Thus I could parse some
headers, and then repeatedly copy the resulting parser.  I used the copies
to compile and link little bits of run-time generated code.  Since most
of the compile time was previously spent on the large headers, this sped
things up dramatically.  My _fuzzy_ recollection is compile and link
times were down around a hundredth of a second.  Some of which was the
surrounding perl infrastructure.

Parser state seemed a bit too scattered for me to easily write a real
tcc_copy().  And even unmodified, libtcc isn't working yet.  But once it
is, I hope to revisit the issue.  The JIT and run-time code generation
possibilities are quite intriguing.

Mitchell Charity
(Btw, I read tinycc-devel on the mailinglist archive, and the archive
 for December has been broken for several days.  So if you need a quick
 response from me, you will need to CC me.)