25 Aug 2002 tromey   » (Master)

Movies

Tadpole. I loved this movie and laughed out loud quite a bit. (I'm a sucker for movies shot on DV.)

Build Tool

Last night I looked into making the build tool impervious to comment and indentation changes in C source. This turns out to be quite easy conceptually: you simply base the file's signature on a tokenized form of the source file. This is feasible if your tokenizer is relatively fast. I'm putting off writing this code, since it isn't entirely trivial and there are more important things that must be done first. I imagine it would be most useful to enable this by default for .h files in the project, and use a (presumably) more efficient text-based scanner for other sources.

I've also figured out how to make "config.h" files work well. The idea here is to change cpp to output more dependency information. Then config.h can compute its signature based on the defines actually inspected by a given compilation. This means that, say, adding a test to config.h will only cause a rebuild of those files which actually use the new define. Something like this would be nice for large projects.

Both these ideas are easy to implement in the current framework.

I've been re-reading the Odin paper again. I always forget how different this approach really is. Odin doesn't put intermediate files like a .o into the build tree. They exist only in the cache. I doubt I'll be going that route. For one thing, I've found that I occasionally look at the .o files to debug some problem or another. Also it feels "too different".

Tonight I'm just working on general cleanup.

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