[swift-dev] Pathway to becoming an effective contributor

[Natthan Leong]

I was not aware of the 'ninja' commands as I have always been using the
documented utils/build-script. Thank you for sharing tips from your development
workflow too. I will try it out!

Cheers,

Nate
github.com/contraultra
mastodon.social/@contraultra

> On Jun 21, 2017, at 2:25 PM, Slava Pestov <spestov at apple.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Jun 21, 2017, at 2:12 PM, Natthan Leong via swift-dev <swift-dev at swift.org <mailto: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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