The Secret to Fast, Reliable Builds – Part 2

In a previous blogpost by Eric Melski, he covered the basic conflict detection algorithm in ElectricMake . It’s surprisingly simple, which is one of its strengths. But if ElectricMake strictly adhered to the simple definition of a conflict, many builds would be needlessly serialized, sapping performance. Over the years we’ve made a variety of tweaks to the core algorithm, adding support for special cases to improve performance. Here are some of those special cases. Non-existence Conflicts One obvious enhancement is to ignore conflicts when the two versions are technically different, but effectively the same. The simplest example is when there are two versions of a file which both indicate non-existence, such as the initial version and the version created by job C in this chain for file foo :

Suppose that job D, which falls between C and E in serial order, runs before any other jobs finish. At runtime, D sees the initial version, but strictly speaking, if it had run in serial order it would have seen the version created by job C. But the two versions are functionally identical — both indicate that the file does not exist. From the perspective of the commands run in job D, there is no detectable difference in behavior regardless of which of these two versions was used. Therefore emake can safely ignore this conflict. To read the rest of this post and find out the other special cases to improve performance, check out Eric Melski’s blog here .