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Compile Go programs 7x faster

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Re: Compile Go programs 7x faster

#11

Post by IanCal »

merb wrote: post #9
bjourne wrote: post #8

Maybe I'm daft, but his table says 502 lines in 1.558 seconds. So 322 lines/second. I thought the Go compiler was supposed to be amazingly fast? That is not fast at all.

This number is not true I guess. scalac with idomatic Scala code (no Macro's) is at 500-700 loc/sec. (And scalac is considered slow by many people) Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxyyJyB_Ssc That would be a slowdown of like 4x to current javac, I guess his computer is just not good enough?

I've got a fairly decent machine, 4 years old but it's a 2.3GHz i7 and I've got an SSD. I got about a 1.5s runtime for "go build" on manul too.

Edit - this blogpost has a 18k lines/s though, I wonder what the differences are?

http://ptspts.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/how-fast-does-8g-in-goo...

Re: Compile Go programs 7x faster

#14

Post by TheHippo »

peterevans wrote: post #13
lazyjones wrote: post #2

This is basically a wrapper for 'go install'. See this post / linked blog posts for an explanation why this is faster/useful: https://twitter.com/davecheney/status/697171533215576064

Running `go build` is a lot like running `make clean` before you compile.

Just use `go build -i` to install everything and compile only packages that have changed.

Re: Compile Go programs 7x faster

#15

Post by jerf »

lazyjones wrote: post #2

This is basically a wrapper for 'go install'. See this post / linked blog posts for an explanation why this is faster/useful: https://twitter.com/davecheney/status/697171533215576064

After reading this discussion and the source of the project, I've flagged this. This "compile Go faster" project really is just about 5 lines of modestly useful bash, and even as someone who often complains people tend to overstate the uselessness of benchmarks, those benchmarks are truly useless. Along with being too small to measure anything useful, almost certainly being dominated by startup overhead, you can't benchmark two fundamentally different things like that. Incremental builds, regardless of language, are not "3x faster" or "9x faster", they're doing fundamentally less work. It's not quite correct to say they're in a different O() class, but that's at least the right sort of thought. O(n^2) algorithms aren't any number of "x" times faster than a O(n^3) algorithm, they're more fundamentally faster than that metric can capture; similarly here.

To the author, I'm not complaining that you have this on github per se, but you may want to make it more clear what's going on here if you're going to submit it to HN. For instance, this is one of those projects where you could literally inline the source into the README.md. And I'd drop the benchmarks, those really aren't useful. Or at least drop the "x times faster" column.

Re: Compile Go programs 7x faster

#16

Post by merb »

IanCal wrote: post #11
merb wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This number is not true I guess. scalac with idomatic Scala code (no Macro's) is at 500-700 loc/sec. (And scalac is considered slow by many people) Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxyyJyB_Ssc That would be a slowdown of like 4x to current javac, I guess his computer is just not good enough?

I've got a fairly decent machine, 4 years old but it's a 2.3GHz i7 and I've got an SSD. I got about a 1.5s runtime for "go build" on manul too. Edit - this blogpost has a 18k lines/s though, I wonder what the differences are? http://ptspts.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/how-fast-does-8g-in-goo...

Does `go build` use multiple core's?

Re: Compile Go programs 7x faster

#17

Post by JepZ »

GickRimes wrote: post #12

Did not think compiling Go programs was that much of an issue. Many texts reference the fact that the whole standard library can be compiled in sub 10sec.

It is not. It was one of the design goals of the language to compile fast...

https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article

So I am wondering too what this is all about.

Re: Compile Go programs 7x faster

#18

Post by wtbob »

GickRimes wrote: post #12

Did not think compiling Go programs was that much of an issue. Many texts reference the fact that the whole standard library can be compiled in sub 10sec.

Since they've switched to a Go compiler from the previous C one, compile times have been pretty terrible.

Re: Compile Go programs 7x faster

#19

Post by IanCal »

merb wrote: post #16
IanCal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got a fairly decent machine, 4 years old but it's a 2.3GHz i7 and I've got an SSD. I got about a 1.5s runtime for "go build" on manul too. Edit - this blogpost has a 18k lines/s though, I wonder what the differences are? http://ptspts.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/how-fast-does-8g-in-goo...

Does `go build` use multiple core's?

There's a flag for it, which didn't make a difference (edit - with the new 1.7 compiler it does, but it goes from half that speed to the same figure). Even with a perfect scaling, I'd be about 10x behind a post from 7 years ago.

Perhaps it's compiling a lot more lines than I think? Lots of bits of the standard library I should be including in the line count?

Re: Compile Go programs 7x faster

#20

Post by ithkuil »

nickcw wrote: post #4
lazyjones wrote: post #2

This is basically a wrapper for 'go install'. See this post / linked blog posts for an explanation why this is faster/useful: https://twitter.com/davecheney/status/697171533215576064

Yes, never use go build, always use go install! go build builds everything, whereas go install does an incremental build on the stuff that has changed and installs it (either in GOPATH/bin or GOPATH/pkg).

FYI, there is also `go build -i`, which is behaves like `go build` in terms of what executable artefacts it produces and where it puts them (i.e. it doesn't install stuff in $GOPATH/bin) but preserves object files for all the dependent packages like `go install` does
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