How would *you* use an intern?

[Fergus Henderson]

On 30-May-2001, Stan Shebs <shebs@apple.com> wrote:
> A more radical change that we were thinking about was to make GCC
> reentrant in some fashion, so you could have multiple incremental
> compiles going on behind the scenes, but not be thrashing the
> machine by bringing up cc1 executables up and down all the time.
> So GCC becomes a sort of compile server, taking big and little
> compilation tasks from the IDE.  To do something like that, you'd
> want to gather up globals into some sort of compile state that
> could be per-thread.

An intermediate step towards that which might perhaps get some of the
benefit would be to have `cc1 --server' just do its initialization and
then fork() for each compilation request from the IDE (or from `gcc',
for that matter).  That would at least save an exec() for each compilation
request.

But I'm not sure how much you'd actually save with this approach.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
                                    |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: < http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh >  |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.