[swift-dev] Pathway to becoming an effective contributor

[Slava Pestov]

> On Jun 21, 2017, at 2:12 PM, Natthan Leong via swift-dev <swift-dev at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> As someone who also recently started contributing, I was surprised to discover
> how much computing power was needed to build Swift. My first few build attempts
> on a mid-2014 rMBP took more than an hour with 100% CPU utilization which is
> unsustainable for future participation.

A clean build of LLVM, swift, and the standard library takes a while, but most of the time you shouldn’t have to rebuild everything from scratch.

For example if I’m just iterating on the compiler, I can edit a couple of source files and run ‘ninja swift’ and have a new compiler binary ready to test in a few seconds. I only rebuild the standard library if absolutely necessary, since that takes longer, but even then ‘ninja swift-stdlib’ is only a few minutes.

Also I always do release builds during normal development, only doing a debug build if I have to run the debugger which isn’t very often. Release builds produce a faster swiftc, so the standard library is built faster, and also they link faster.

Finally, it is possible to run only a subset of the validation tests while you’re iterating on a specific feature, instead of having to wait the ~15 minutes for ‘ninja check-swift-validation’, by directly invoking lit.

Slava

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