Ubuntu first time

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 04:15:26PM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> Not to take away from your main point, but compiling from source ought
> to be a lot cheaper than it is.  For some reason we've made our build
> systems ridiculously cumbersome.
> 
> The autoconf etc. crap is one big culprit.  Another is overly
> intricate header files.  There are layers of this crud.

autoconf is quite a nightmare and seeing something spend 5 minutes running
configure and then compiling 5 source files in 10 seconds is crazy.
autoconf is also a nightmare for cross compiling.

> The wizard Fabrice Bellard demonstrated some of this in his amazing
> TCCBOOT hack
> <http://news.slashdot.org/story/04/10/25/2245259/TCCBOOT-Compiles-And-Boots-Linux-In-15-Seconds>
> 
> The original Pascal compiler didn't bother producing binaries since
> compiling was about as fast as loading binaries (circa 1970).  But
> then it didn't have a good system for modular programs.

So a tiny ancient kernel without modules can compile quickly on a fast
machine.  I don't see this being generally useful though.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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