Building FF with tcc
Reuben Thomas <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.fonts.fontforge.devel |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <CAOnWdojmMme2AvhaaH=cAuO7SkFBNTT0-agzs5tZCCkx3oXvEw@mail.gmail.com> |
I thought other developers may be interested in a little experiment I did today: I built FontForge with tcc: http://bellard.org/tcc/ TCC is a very fast and small C compiler, which began life unpromisingly as an entry in the International Obfuscated C Code Contest, by the legendary Fabrice Bellard (of ffmpeg, Javascript PC Emulator and other fame). I was interested to see if I could get a faster build. I could. One of the nice things about using a faster C compiler is that it also speeds up configuration considerably. On my quad-core Core i5 2.5GHz/16Gb Sandy Bridge (i.e. fairly modest) system, using make -j 4 to run up to 4 jobs in parallel, and ccache with a well-primed cache, meaning that this test tells us more about compiler start-up time than raw compilation performance, this took: CC=tcc LD=tcc ./configure && make: 1m9s ./configure && make: 1m59s CFLAGS=-O0 ./configure && make: 1m46s I did not exercise the resulting binaries hard, but it opened the GUI with a font loaded and passed the test suite (the tcc version was noticeably slower running the CPU-intensive test 45 than the optimized GCC version, and noticeably faster than the unoptimized GCC version). Unfortunately this required patches to both tcc (to define preprocessor symbols needed by the Python headers) and libtool (to extend its tcc support), so I wouldn't recommend this to anyone else just yet, but all the patches have gone upstream. For developers who like me rather miss the zero compilation times of more modern systems, I recommend taking a look at tcc when it and libtool have each had another release (i.e. tcc > 0.9.26 and libtool > 2.4.2). I also found a few little niggles in FontForge that tcc correctly detected, and I'll push those shortly. -- http://rrt.sc3d.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Infragistics Professional Build stunning WinForms apps today! Reboot your WinForms applications with our WinForms controls. Build a bridge from your legacy apps to the future. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=153845071&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Fontforge-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fontforge-devel