Fastmake
Encyclopedia
Fastmake is a program that is used mainly by software developers to maintain software build process.
Fastmake is one of the make programs family. The most similar make program is GNU make. Fastmake differs from GNU make in that it contains additional features that extend Makefile syntax and increase program speed.
Fastmake was started in 2005 as a replacement for dmake build tool. That years the Makefile syntax was as in dmake. In 2008 Fastmake was published and became available for downloading. Since then Makefile syntax has been moving towards GNU make. This is because GNU make is widely used and therefore there is more chance for Fastmake to be useful.
The key starting point of Fastmake performance optimization is working within one operating system process.
When a classic make program needs to respawn itself it launches another operating system process while Fastmake calls a function which creates new context and works within the same process. This allows to maintain effective caches for entire build tree. Also Fastmake offers fast replacements for most popular shell tools like cp, echo and so on.
One of the tasks that takes place in software build process is determining dependencies. Fastmake has integrated dependency scanner for C/C++ source files.
Syntax improvements are aimed to solve some essential build automation tasks that are hard to be done via GNU make. Such tasks are combined or 'parallel' compilation, automatic dependencies tracking, omitting TAB character in Makefile that is hard in many editors and so on.
Fastmake is an open and free program that means that it is free of charge with source code
available.
Fastmake is written in the C++
programming language. GNU bison
program is used to generate parser module.
Flex lexical analyser
program is used to generate lexeme generator.
Fastmake is one of the make programs family. The most similar make program is GNU make. Fastmake differs from GNU make in that it contains additional features that extend Makefile syntax and increase program speed.
Fastmake was started in 2005 as a replacement for dmake build tool. That years the Makefile syntax was as in dmake. In 2008 Fastmake was published and became available for downloading. Since then Makefile syntax has been moving towards GNU make. This is because GNU make is widely used and therefore there is more chance for Fastmake to be useful.
The key starting point of Fastmake performance optimization is working within one operating system process.
When a classic make program needs to respawn itself it launches another operating system process while Fastmake calls a function which creates new context and works within the same process. This allows to maintain effective caches for entire build tree. Also Fastmake offers fast replacements for most popular shell tools like cp, echo and so on.
One of the tasks that takes place in software build process is determining dependencies. Fastmake has integrated dependency scanner for C/C++ source files.
Syntax improvements are aimed to solve some essential build automation tasks that are hard to be done via GNU make. Such tasks are combined or 'parallel' compilation, automatic dependencies tracking, omitting TAB character in Makefile that is hard in many editors and so on.
Fastmake is an open and free program that means that it is free of charge with source code
Source code
In computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...
available.
Fastmake is written in the C++
C++
C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...
programming language. GNU bison
GNU bison
GNU bison, commonly known as Bison, is a parser generator that is part of the GNU Project. Bison reads a specification of a context-free language, warns about any parsing ambiguities, and generates a parser which reads sequences of tokens and decides whether the sequence conforms to the syntax...
program is used to generate parser module.
Flex lexical analyser
Flex lexical analyser
flex is a free software alternative to lex. It is frequently used with the free Bison parser generator. Unlike Bison, flex is not part of the GNU Project. Flex was written in C by Vern Paxson around 1987...
program is used to generate lexeme generator.