Looking for speed increases in "make index" and pkg_version for ports

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith]

On Mon, 28 May 2007, David Naylor wrote:

> On Monday 28 May 2007 03:43, you wrote:
>> Maybe I should look at the inner workings of cmake and gmake.  Maybe
>> they have some good ideas.  However having looked through the source
>> code of make, and also looking at the cvs logs, it does seem to be well
>> written.  The only possibility I see of making it go a lot faster is a
>> complete redesign, e.g. my just in time idea for processing variables.
>>
>> Stephen
>
> Just in time (jit), if I remember correctly, is a term used by java
> interpreters which compile the byte code into machine code!!!  Perhaps this
> could be developed for makefile's, especially bsd.*.mk.
>
> This, I think, could be done in two ways:
> 1) Develop the bsd.*.mk files in C and link it in with make, or
> 2) Use the makefiles as source to compile into machine code (passibly via
> C->ASM).  The machine code could be created on demand, or cached and only
> updated if the source makefile changes.
>
> I am not sure if this could work or even if it will have any significant speed
> increase.  However if method 2 does work it has the potential to radically
> increase the speed of ports _while_ maintaining the flexability.
>
> All that will be needed is an API for the machine code and a compiler???
>

My gut reaction is the same as yours - I doubt that this would bring any 
speed increases.  And the programming effort would be huge.