Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!bionet!agate!saturn!sidney From: sidney@saturn.ucsc.edu (Sidney Markowitz ) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++ Subject: Re: A little more info on ParcPlace Obj Message-ID: <8787@saturn.ucsc.edu> Date: 21 Aug 89 06:12:53 GMT References: <3697@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu> <77300032@p.cs.uiuc.edu> Reply-To: sidney@saturn.ucsc.edu (Sidney Markowitz ) Organization: University of California, Santa Cruz Lines: 21 In article <77300032@p.cs.uiuc.edu> johnson@p.cs.uiuc.edu writes: [quote is edited] >Browsers are very nice, but the best part of [ObjectWorks for C++] [...] > is incremental compilation. [...] Thus, if you change a small >procedure in your huge program then you will get a new version of the >a.out file in just a few seconds. The number I saw was about 15 seconds In a talk I attended recently by a ParcPlace spokesperson, the quoted design goal was to compile and link in a change in under 1 minute. However, they are building ObjectWorks for C++ around the existing compiler (in this case Cfront 2.0 on the Sun). They simulate the effect of incremental compilation by generating a file containing the preprocessor directives (e.g. #include) and the function being modified. That means that if you are working with a coding style that leads to files #including a lot of source code, any change you make will cause all that included code to be recompiled, losing much of the benefits of true incremental compilation. The speaker did not describe any details of the link process. I interpreted what was said as implying that ParcPlace wrote a linking facility to handle it. -- sidney markowitz