Re: [MAD SCIENCE EXPERIMENT]: Replace some libtool functionality with handcoded C

[Mohan Embar <gnustuff at thisiscool dot com>]

Hi Alexandre,

>I'm not all that surprised your C program is much faster that the
>shell script.  For starters, it fails to support all of libtool's
>configure-time options, such as --disable-static, --disable-shared,
>--with-pic, as well as their per-compilation equivalent command-line
>flags.

I agree. I wasn't even trying to go there.

(For those of you CCed, Alexandre was responding to my post on
java-patches:

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/java-patches/2003-q4/msg00609.html

)

>Back during the GCC summit, Zack Weinberg suggested an alternative
>approach that could speed things up: getting the libtool code to
>define additional Makefile macros that would enable someone to inline
>the libtool calls into the Makefile itself.

>Wanna give it a try?

This sounds very tempting, but I'm afraid I'd need to learn a lot
more about automake and autoconf before I'm ready for this. (Coming
from a Windows background, I already needed to get some brain implants
to decipher things like this:

>LIBTOOL_END_COMPILE_CC = ; shift 1; \
>  { test -d $$dir"/$(libtool_libdir) || \
>    $(mkdir_p) "$$dir"/$(libtool_libdir); } && \
>  rm -f "$$lofile"T "$$lofile" "$$dir/$$ofile" \
>    "$$dir/$(libtool_libdir)/$$ofile" || : ; \
>  $(LIBTOOL_COMPILE_CC_PIC) -o "$$dir/$(libtool_libdir)/$$ofile" \
>    $${1+"$$@"} && \
>  $(LIBTOOL_COMPILE_CC_NONPIC) -o "$$dir/$$ofile" $${1+"$$@"} && \
>  { echo pic_object=$(LIBTOOL_PIC_OBJECT); \
>    echo non_pic_object=$(LIBTOOL_NONPIC_OBJECT); } > "$$lofile"T && \
>  mv "$$lofile"T "$$lofile"

:)

)

For now, I'm going to continue my experiment and see if I can follow through
on it to remove the build-time dependency on libtool of the i686-pc-linux-gnu
top-level native build. I don't think my experiment will ever get accepted,
but I'm curious to see what the final C program looks like and I figure that
it can be used as sort of discussion topic for next steps. (Or not....)

-- Mohan
http://www.thisiscool.com/
http://www.animalsong.org/