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Catherine
@whitequark
whoa, kati (github.com/google/kati) is awesome. i'm using some makefiles with a large (>1s with no changes) hot rebuild latency that is intensely irritating. built kati, spent a few minutes figuring out the things it didn't quite like, now hot rebuilds are -instant-
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Daniel Micay
@DanielMicay
Replying to
@kure_ji_neko
and
@whitequark
It uses lower time complexity algorithms, avoids lots of unnecessary work and has built-in implementations of commonly used shell commands. It has clever things like a built-in $(shell find) where it can track the timestamps of those directories and avoid running find again.
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Daniel Micay
@DanielMicay
Replying to
@DanielMicay
@kure_ji_neko
and
@whitequark
It's not just that ninja is faster but that it's a much faster implementation of dealing with make. It's not an entirely complete GNU make implementation and they take the practical approach of requiring minor build system adjustments. It's also more reliable than GNU make.
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Daniel Micay
@DanielMicay
Replying to
@DanielMicay
@kure_ji_neko
and
@whitequark
It's clever enough to realize that it needs to cope with environment variables changing, etc. compared to GNU make where if you change CFLAGS, it's not going to realize that it actually needs to rebuild everything. It was made as a stopgap while Android moves to Blueprint files.
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Daniel Micay
@DanielMicay
Replying to
@DanielMicay
@kure_ji_neko
and
@whitequark
I think it would be very useful for many people outside of Android if they knew it existed. There are a lot of other neat tools like this in Android and Chromium. They're huge projects and they come up with some really nice tooling to deal with real problems in a practical way.
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Daniel Micay
@DanielMicay
Replying to
@DanielMicay
@kure_ji_neko
and
@whitequark
kati is particularly optimized for the template-based Android make build system. Android turned make into a declarative build system where you describe the end result with variables and it figures out what to do. It was quite nice but Blueprint formalizes it and makes it nicer.
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Daniel Micay
@DanielMicay
Replying to
@DanielMicay
@kure_ji_neko
and
@whitequark
Other projects could adopt kati by purging some edge cases from their build system, teaching it how to handle some others and teaching it to optimize for their own idioms. It would be pretty easy and it would save them huge amounts of development time. Turns minutes to seconds.
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Daniel Micay
@DanielMicay
Replying to
@DanielMicay
@kure_ji_neko
and
@whitequark
I can think of other examples of tools that are almost completely unknown elsewhere and could be quite useful to others. source.android.com/devices/archit is an example I've talked about with
@whitequark
before. android.googlesource.com/kernel/build/+ is a newer project to do this for Linux modules.
source.android.com
ABI Stability  |  Android Open Source Project
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