[Lazarus] I desperately need some ideas of reducing edit, compile, debug cycle

[Max Vlasov]

On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 1:52 PM, Sven Barth <pascaldragon at googlemail.com>wrote:

> On 27.11.2010 11:01, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, 27 Nov 2010, Max Vlasov wrote:
>>
>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 1:48 AM, Michael Van Canneyt
>>> <michael at freepascal.org> wrote:
>>> What you may want to do is try and avoid windows when working with
>>> Lazarus. Lazarus/FPC still works
>>> significantly faster on Linux.
>>>
>>>
>>> Michael, is it known why it's still so? I mean, apart from os-specific
>>> bindings, general i386 code should compile
>>> identically (loops, searches and so on). Also linker for Windows is
>>> rewritten some time ago as long as I remember to be
>>> fast enough.
>>>
>>
>> I have no idea; I work almost exclusively with Linux for Lazarus/FPC. On
>> the rare cases I compile something for windows, I notice that the same
>> project still compiles less fast.
>> The IDE itself is a good testcase there :-)
>>
>
> At least the startup time on Windows is much slower as on Linux, because on
> Windows (at least on NT) you have multiple API layers while on Linux there's
> mostly only the C library and with Free Pascal not even that.
>
> On Windows you have the Win32 API libraries that either can do stuff
> themselves (good), call functions from ntdll to do the job (a bit less good)
> or even call the Win32 subsystem server (IPC!) which is - compared to the
> other two - a very slow process.
>
> These IPC calls also happen on application startup, because the kernel is
> informing the Win32 subsystem that there is a new process (and a new thread
> - the main thread) in the system that it has to take care of. Also the API
> that is provided by the Win32 subsystem carries around much overhead out of
> compatibility reasons which slows down at least process startup
> (initialization of TLS, console information (if any), thread information,
> window information) as well.
>
> That's why the introduction of the internal linker reduced compile time on
> Windows that much: one less process to execute :D
>
>

Sven, it all really matters, but on modern computers with enough memory
installed all these hd-related difference become irrelevant on the next
usage of the same files/executables/dlls, since they all go to the system
cache. Lazarus IDE starts in less than a second on my win7 notebook after
the first run/exit.

I did also some checking with compiling. Inside the Lazrus and if I did the
same from command-line with ppc386, the compile time for lazarus.lpi is 5.4
seconds if a did not any single change and a little more ( 5.7 ms) (the
numbers from ppc386). If I did a change to one of the pascal files. gdb
start is about 3 seconds, but I just checked, this is because of the
anti-virus was probably investigating the new running exe file (if I switch
AV off, the program appears almost instantly). Michael mentioned "a couple
of seconds at most" and he is known to be working on IDE :), so if on his
linux machine ide compiles/links in less than two seconds, then it really
can be a noticeable difference for a comparatively big project (although we
can not comparing without comparing hardware configurations)

Max
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.lazarus-ide.org/pipermail/lazarus/attachments/20101127/4732e24c/attachment-0003.html>