[webkit-gtk] General question: Long compilation times

[Sergio Villar Senin]

Hi Dennis,

there are definitely features you could disable at build time, check
all the ENABLE_XXX defines. You can pass them to the build-webkit
script using --cmakeargs=ARGS, for example to disable geolocation:

--cmakeargs="-DENABLE_GEOLOCATION=OFF"

However I cannot skip mentioning that the machine you're trying to use
to build WebKit is clearly not suitable for the task. There have been
efforts to reduce build times (like unified builds) but still we're
talking about a multi-million SLOC project. Note that developers
working on WebKit use either very powerful desktops with a lot of CPUs
or build farms (or even both).

What you consider as "only show some text and images" is actually a
pretty complex piece of code that involves networking code to fetch
resources, CSS parsing, HTML parsing, layout/render/graphicslayer...
trees construction, JavaScript interpretation, image decoding,
rasterization, (accelerated) composition.... and many other things.

If you just need a browser basically for text perhaps you could use
links instead (although I am not sure about its current state).

BR

O Xov, 02-01-2020 ás 09:25 -0500, Dennis New escribiu:
> Compiling the latest webkit-gtk took about 3 days of compilation (not
> the entire day, just when my laptop was on, but still) on my 1.6ghz
> machine, over 2 gigs of ram (even after disabling the unified
> jumbo-build), and about a gig of diskspace. I think this took longer
> than compiling my entire operating system, including the linux
> kernel,
> all of opengl, the gcc compiler and gtk too.
> 
> And all this to basically show some text and images. (I only need
> this
> browser engine to use my bank's website and online maps, even though
> there is no good reason why javascript is needed for either.)
> 
> Is there a good reason that it needs to be this way, or is this
> merely
> the accidental result of accumulating bloat/feature-creep? A kind of
> Rube Goldberg machine? It would be great to have a "minimal" build
> option to only compile the essential stuff, hopefully in less than an
> hour. Or maybe to break the project up into separate packages that
> don't all need to be updated.
> 
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