Comment by m463
the first launch of firefox would take a few hours.
let alone the first boot of the linux kernel... :)
the first launch of firefox would take a few hours.
let alone the first boot of the linux kernel... :)
Just because you are used to slow compilers doesn't mean fast ones are impossible. As I said in the original post, code optimisation can be done before compilation on the developers machine, so all that need be done on the target is a simple debug build. An example is Jonathon Blow's JAI compiler which compiles around 250,000 lines of code per second. Even on very slow hardware this is reduced to perhaps 80,000LoC/s, two minutes for 10 million lines of code. Most users would be tolerant of an "install" box with a progress bar that takes at most two minutes for only the largest application on the computer. Or perhaps the browser people would opt not to distribute their software in this way. Advanced software may have advanced needs, beyond that of the average application. Most code is already written in Javascript these days, meaning it begins life being interpreted and is JIT compiled on the user's computer. Few seem to notice the compilation but many complain about the general sluggishness.
If you offered users a deal: spend 1 minute installing the software and it is snappy and responsive when you use it, I suspect all would accept.
I fail to see how that relates to my using it as an example of a fast compiler. For that matter, my suggested approach doesn't need to to release source code, just some kind of programming language code. You could minify it, pre-optimise it, or do any number of things that would mean it isn't source code but instead becomes derived code (as I said in my original comment). Distributing textual code is not the same as being open source. I'm really just saying you should distribute something that isn't a platform specific blob with a fixed binary interface. You could, for instance, use LLVM IR code to achieve this, which is little more than a kind of portable assembly. LLVM can apply heavy optimisations to this code on the developer's machine, then take only the last step of code generation on the user's machine.
This is somewhat exaggerated.
The compilation of firefox could take a few hours on some laptop dual-core Skylake CPU from 10 years ago.
Nowadays, on any decent dektop CPU with many cores the compilation of Firefox should take significantly less than an hour, though it remains one of the handful of open-source applications with a really long and non-negligible compilation time.
The Linux kernel is normally compiled much faster than Firefox, except when one would enable the compilation of all existing kernel modules, for all the hardware that could be supported by Linux, even if almost all of that is not present and it would never be present on the target computer system.