Barnes: Parallel ./configure
Date:
Tue, 29 Apr 2025 13:46:14 +0000
Description:
Tavian Barnes takes on
the tedious process of waiting for configure scripts to run. I paid good
money for my 24 CPU cores, but ./configure can only
manage to use 69% of one of them. As a result, this random project
takes about 13.5 longer to configure the build than it does to
actually do the build. The purpose of a ./configure script is basically to run the
compiler a bunch of times and check which runs succeeded. In this
way it can test whether particular headers, functions, struct
fields, etc. exist, which lets people write portable software. This
is an embarrassingly parallel problem, but Autoconf can't
parallelize it, and neither can CMake, neither can Meson, etc.,
etc. (Thanks to Paul Wise).
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Link to news story:
https://lwn.net/Articles/1019303/
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