[webkit-dev] Build File Maintenance (was Re: Please welcome GYP to the our dysfunctional build family)

[Kevin Ollivier]

Hi Peter,

On Jul 14, 2009, at 10:27 AM, Peter Kasting wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 9:24 AM, Kevin Ollivier <kevino at theolliviers.com 
> > wrote:
> Of course, the big question is if waf would have the same  
> limitations as SCons in regards to doing this, but I think it's at  
> least worth exploring. I'd be interested to know what limitations  
> you guys ran into when trying to use SCons for this sort of thing.  
> Of course, there will always be some things that would be hard to do  
> with the IDE projects, but it may be possible for us to make use of  
> waf there too, by using command line arguments to have it, for  
> example, only generate the derived sources, which we could call from  
> the IDE projects.
>
> I don't really know enough about either waf or SCons to comment.  My  
> impression as a naive observer was that SCons had serious speed  
> issues with our build (especially the overhead for a null build).

Yeah, I hit the same problems as well, and after some profiling and  
discussions on the SCons mailing list, came to the conclusion that  
SCons simply had architectural issues that made it a poor choice for a  
large project like WebKit.

The overhead for waf is minimal, though, and quite possibly even less  
than make on Unix systems. Some benchmarks done have shown it to be  
significantly faster than make, in fact, which is my subjective  
opinion as well. My Windows builds also feel noticeably faster, but  
then again I was using .vc makefiles, which meant I couldn't do  
parallel builds there. ;-) I just haven't had time to really sit down  
and benchmark.

Thanks,

Kevin

> PK

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/attachments/20090714/add0f6f1/attachment.html>