Incremental Compilers with Internal Build Systems

Jeff Smits

Compilation time is an important factor in the adaptability of a software project. Fast (incremental) recompilation enables cheap experimentation with changes to a project, as those changes can be tested quickly. Despite the benefits of an incremental compiler, such compilers are usually not the default. Published research on incremental compilation often shows how to build an incremental compiler from the ground up, based on a programming language that is well-suited for such a compilation scheme. We have found in our own work that when the first compiler for a language is not incremental, and language features are not developed with that incremental compiler in mind, it can be hard to develop such a compiler at a later time. We address this problem by developing a compiler design approach that reuses parts of an existing non-incremental compiler to lower the cost of building an incremental compiler. The key idea on which we build our incremental compiler is that we use an incremental build system internally to wire together the components we extract from the original compiler. We demonstrate our design approach on the Stratego programming language.

Part of the Symposium on Build Systems

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