[Scons-dev] SCons performance investigations

[Russel Winder]

On Thu, 2017-07-27 at 13:32 -0700, Bill Deegan wrote:
> See comments inline..
> 
> On Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 10:39 AM, Russel Winder <russel at winder.org.uk>
> wrote:
> 
[…]
> > But no-one else in SCons-land seems interested in these things that come
> > as
> > standard in CMake and Meson. Thus small but sometimes decisive negative
> > points
> > for SCons.
> > 
> 
> I don't think that's a fair statement.

Judging by the level of use and commentary on email lists, I'm afraid it is.
It is likely that current SCons users don't do these things, and that people
who do use Meson, CMake, or Autotools. So separate communities.

[…]
> Sure.. Any help is welcome, even if it's not code but making the community
> aware of other tools and their relative strengths/weeknesses..

There are still some D thinks pending. I thought they were in a pull request,
but it maybe that I haven't created it yet. I'll try and do that so that the
dub tool is the only thing left in that chunk of work.

I think we should take up the point Jason made about creating a conan tool. I
can get involved by not before September.

[…]
> If you're talking about the smart linker which attempts to set up the link
> line based on what type of objects are feeding into the link, I'm sure
> there's room for improvement. Though it doe work at this point if you're
> using the "batteries" included tools.

I may well have been the last person to touch the smart linker. If anything I
probably made it more fragile than it already was. However the SCons core is
about C, C++, Fortran, and D, so a review and rewrite is likely a good move to
make it less fragile. 

[…]
> > Has the "integration" with CVCS repositories as locations of sources been
> > deprecated/removed? Should DVCS integration be included? Go and Cargo both
> > support getting code for compilation from Git, Mercurial and Bazaar (soon
> > to
> > be replaced by Breeze) repositories.
> > 
> 
> Yes deprecated a long time ago. Remaining dregs removed in 3.0.
> This would require a rethink and a better approach, and would hopefully
> support git, hg, and be extendable to most other CVS and DVCS's.

As I understand things the SCCS/RCS/CVS/Subversion support was for getting
files for the project being built. With the benefit of hindsight I think they
were the wrong thing to do, SCons should only build a working tree. However,
CVCS and DVCS support for getting dependencies, even if source to create a
working tree to build to create a shared or static library, seems like a good
thing. Go and Rust have strategies for this via "go get" and various Cargo
commands respectively. As far as I am aware Autotools, CMake, and Meson
currently have no equivalent functionality.

[…]
> Yes once we switch to github.

Despite having a renewed liking of Mercurial, I can get behind a switch to Git
on GitHub.

[…]
-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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