On Sun, 29 Sep 2024, Sad Clouds wrote:

> Over the years I got frustrated with autoconf.
>
> It is quite slow, especially on old machines like Sun Ultra 10. It 
> could take several minutes to run autoconf scripts and then several 
> seconds to compile some small open source package. If you are 
> building large number of packages from something like pkgsrc, the 
> issue is magnified significantly. Even on fast machines with many 
> CPUs, autoconf inhibits parallelization, as it runs its tests 
> sequentially and then many packages repeat the same tests over and 
> over again, it is really bonkers. The issues are quite noticeable 
> when bulk building many packages. 

The Sun Ultra 10 is indeed very old.  But my early experiences with 
Autoconf started in 1993 on a SPARCclassic "server" (running Solaris 
2.1), which is much slower than that. :-)

In order to speed autoconf scripts for tests which always produce the 
same answer, one can create a 'config.site' script with cached 
results, and refer to it with the CONFIG_SITE environment variable. 
If you are bulk-building many packages using similar configuration 
options, this will result in a huge speed-up.

A good thing about autoconf is that it almost always produces the 
correct answer, and packages depending on autoconf+automake+libtool 
are extremely consistent and predictable.  I have found that projects 
based on CMake are not nearly as consistent and predictable.

Bob
-- 
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
Public Key,     http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/public-key.txt
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