How to get doxygen to run faster? - build-process

Doxygen is a bit slow - it takes about a couple of minutes to process my whole project, so for small incremental changes this is longer than actually building the rest of my code. There are thousands of files without any documentation so I guess it is spending most of its time processing them. Is there any way to get it to skip files without any documentation?
What about getting it to only process changed files?

From Doxygen documentation:
How can I exclude all test directories
from my directory tree?
Simply put an exclude pattern like
this in the configuration file:
EXCLUDE_PATTERNS = /test/
So, you should be using patterns to exclude files. It's been a long time since I've used Doxygen, but i don't remember any option to process only changed files.

I found that turning off the option SEARCH_INCLUDES made a big difference. It was looking through the whole platform SDK and include paths for the compiler which were not documented anyway and would not appear in the generated documentation.

There is a DOT_NUM_THREADS options which may increase the performance on multicore machines. Unfortunately doxygen itself is just single threaded.
Another approach would be to organize your code into modules run for each module a separate doxygen instance and link the resulting tags together: http://www.doxygen.nl/manual/external.html

Doxygen is good at finding connections between files, either changed or not. But Doxygen does not remember informations about unchanged files, so it must process the whole codebase each time.
May be a solution would be to organize the project such that never changed files belong to one module which is excluded from Doxygen scope and whose documentation is already available. Then it would be possible to tell Doxygen to link newly built documentation to this existing module documentation.
Going further, it would also be possible to make Doxygen running module by module, processing only changed modules and a top level documentation which links to all module documentations.

I don't think having Doxygen run on a normal dev cycle is a good idea. Our Doxygen build runs as part of our Continuous Integration server's responsibilities.
That said, there are some benefits of running doxygen every build to catch missing docs.
So I would trim the doxygen config for dev builds removing diagrams, and even stop apple importing it into xcode.

Related

how to set Bazel --warn_duplicate_resources flag in java rules?

I'm trying to figure out how to set a flag in the Bazel BUILD file or .bazelrc file so that I can turn on the --warn_duplicate_resources or --no_duplicates flags when building a Java jar (actually Scala in my case, but the answer should be the same). I want to make it so that if Bazel sees duplicate files when packaging a jar (such as two different logback.xml files) the build will fail instead of picking one file and discarding the other.
I had some issues with shadowing of different resources when building a new jar using an old jar. After rummaging through the internet I found the --warn_duplicate_resources flag in the bazel code base in a few different places as well as a --no_duplicates flag. These seem like they would be helpful making sure to avoid the problem of multiple jar files defining the same resource file.
https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/blob/master/src/java_tools/singlejar/java/com/google/devtools/build/singlejar/SingleJar.java
https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/blob/master/src/tools/singlejar/output_jar.cc
However, I have no idea what flags to put in the BUILD or .bazelrc files to get the --warn_duplicate_resources or --no_duplicates flags turned on. The java_library rule doesn't seem to have any direct connection and simply adding "build --warn_duplicate_resources" to the .bazelrc caused the build to fail.
https://docs.bazel.build/versions/master/be/java.html#java_library
Any help will be much appreciated, thanks!

Qt Lite and configuration changes in Qt 5.8

So allegedly, the configuration tool for Qt went through some changes, necessary to be able to make more streamlined Qt builds, a.k.a "Qt Lite". However, there doesn't seem to be any documentation about how to use that feature, or at least I don't find any, and looking at the comments from the release announcement, others can't neither.
What's more, the changes are definitely in there, judging by the fact that the configuration that I've been using for the last couple of years fails in a bunch of ways. I am not sure how up-to-date the built in help is, since the last time I tried using it for guidance, it turned out it was largely outdated and contained options that were no longer supported.
So it would be nice if someone could shed some light on what has changed and how, and how to configure for "Lite" builds. And especially on module and feature dependencies, because I think we'd all like to avoid wasting time on builds that will start building despite an improper configuration that omits necessary dependencies just to have it inevitably fail and result in nothing but a waste of time.
Per to the changelog:
The configuration system has been rewritten almost from scratch. This improved the consistency between builds on Unix and Windows, but some subtle unintended behavior changes are also possible. Also, some obsolete options have been entirely removed and will now cause errors.
It is not permissible any more to manually #define QT_NO_
anywhere. Instead, configure's -no-feature-* options must be used.
Note that this does not apply to defines which modify behavior rather
than entirely removing features.
The -no-feature-* option family was integrated with the rest of the
configuration system. Numerous existing features were made optional,
and build problems in various reduced configurations were fixed.
This is an ongoing effort known as "Qt Lite".
Features for -no-feature-* lists are in qtbase\src\corelib\global\qfeatures.txt.
All features are enabled by default.
More information can be found in the Qt Lite Overview Presentation and its slides.
You can also use the new UI Tool which is known as Qt Configuration Tool and which is a part of Qt for Embedded Devices package - see its documentation. The configuration tool is available for commercial Qt customers only at the moment (Qt 5.8).
The changes that are behind my failed configuration:
there is no longer the option to specify whether sql support is built-in or plug-in, so the format is now just -sql-<driver>, the documentation is still not updated and lists the old format - -<option>-sql-<driver>.
the -l option to add a specific library has been removed, which is turning out to be problematic in multiple areas.
Edit: Also, this blog entry just posted on doing lite builds might be useful.
Everything that describes what the new configuration system understands is given in the configure.json files scattered around Qt modules. The configure tool uses these files to build a list of command line arguments it understands.
Without the use of other tools, to learn about Qt features you need to inspect these json files and choose the features/options you wish turned on or off.
Sub Configurations
These act as includes, and refer to the configure.json file in a given folder. E.g. qtbase/configure.json includes qtbase/src/corelib/configure.json, qtbase/src/network/configure.json etc.:
"subconfigs": [
"src/corelib",
"src/network",
[...]
],
Explicit Command Line Options
The commandline/options value lists the configure options a given Qt module understands. These options are separate from the feature system, although they may be used for convenience to provide shorthand aliases that control features. For example, in qtbase/configure.json, we have:
{ "commandline": { "options": { "accessibility": "boolean", [...] }
This command line option controls the identically named accessibility feature. It is more convenient to use than dealing with the feature system's option [-no]-feature-accessibility. The following pairs have identical effects:
-accessibility or -feature-accessibility
-no-accessibility or -no-feature-accessibility
Values:
boolean options are given to configure as -option and -no-option, meaning true and false, respectively.
all other options are given as -option value.
Feature Options
The features value lists the features available in a given module. The features are effectively booleans. They are all enabled by default, subject to passing configuration tests that enable them.
To control a feature foo:
-no-feature-foo disables the feature. E.g. to disable the iconv feature, you'd do configure -no-feature-iconv [...].
-feature-foo enables the feature and ensures that it is available. This will cause an error if a configuration test for the feature fails. It's useful in build systems that build a particularly configured Qt along with your application: it ensures that the features your code depends on will be available.
Failing Builds
Generally speaking, no matter what combination of feature selections you provide, if configure doesn't fail, the build is supposed to succeed.
we'd all like to avoid wasting time on builds that will start building despite an improper configuration
The configure tool will detect any invalid configurations. If configure succeeds yet the build fails, it's a Qt bug and you should report it.

Using MSBUILD like a classic MAKEfile -- how do I do this?

I'm frustrated by the lack of flexibility in the Visual Studio project/solution, but I realized that now that it uses MSBUILD it might be quite powerful but just doesn't expose that to the IDE. So I took a look at MSBUILD docs and don't know where to start! I wish there was a Nutshell book for that. Is there any good tutorial someone could point me to?
More specifically, here is the kinds of things I want to do:
Run a utility pre-processor to generate .CPP and .H files, which are then used by a regular C++ project. There are multiple inputs (to figure dependencies of; specifically should know if a normal .h file it uses has changed) and multiple outputs (at least one .cpp and one .h file) that are used as files in another project.
FWIW, the most complex case involves using Qt in a "normal" C++ project that can be built using VS Express 2010 or MSBUILD directly from a script on a server. Since that is a common library, there might be some guides or whatever to help? Note that a VS plug-in is not useful for the building stage, but could be used to initially generate project files that then rely only on MSBUILD and stuff included with the source code.
Would somebody please point me in the right direction?
--John
It gets worse from there, but that's my first goal.
I found the kind of information I was looking for in a book MSBuild Trickery: 99 Ways to Bend the Build Engine to Your Will by Brian Kretzler.
In the first 18 pages I found a few key pieces of information that, along with the on-line documentations I've already gone through, helps clear things up enough to try tackling my project. Details of interest include the processing order of how MSBuild reads and operates on the things in the file, quick points on when wildcard in items are expanded and how to handle generated files, and how to see what's happening in some practical cases or even step in the debugger.
FWIW, I managed to attack my problem without using the murky ".targets"/rules files that I have yet to understand, but only using better documented/exampled features (in particular, a Target that has wildcard items doesn't care that the file name extension is not in any ".target"; is simple enough to copy from example and allows the files to be seen in the IDE Project and added to the list using the IDE; again, the FileExtension there just works OK.)

designing large projects in OCaml [closed]

Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 4 years ago.
Improve this question
What is a best practices to write large software projects in OCaml?
How do you structure your projects?
What features of OCaml should and should not be used to simplify code management? Exceptions? First-class modules? GADTs? Object types?
Build system? Testing framework? Library stack?
I found great recommendations for haskell and I think it would be good to have something similar for OCaml.
I am going to answer for a medium-sized project in the conditions that I am familiar with, that is between 100K and 1M lines of source code and up to 10 developers. This is what we are using now, for a project started two months ago in August 2013.
Build system and code organization:
one source-able shell script defines PATH and other variables for our project
one .ocamlinit file at the root of our project loads a bunch of libraries when starting a toplevel session
omake, which is fast (with -j option for parallel builds); but we avoid making crazy custom omake plugins
one root Makefile contains all the essential targets (setup, build, test, clean, and more)
one level of subdirectories, not two
most subdirectories build into an OCaml library
some subdirectories contain other things (setup, scripts, etc.)
OCAMLPATH contains the root of the project; each library subdirectory produces a META file, making all OCaml parts of the projects accessible from the toplevel using #require.
only one OCaml executable is built for the whole project (saves a lot of linking time; still not sure why)
libraries are installed via a setup script using opam
local opam packages are made for software that it not in the official opam repository
we use an opam switch which is an alias named after our project, avoiding conflicts with other projects on the same machine
Source-code editing:
emacs with opam packages ocp-indent and ocp-index
Source control and management:
we use git and github
all new code is peer-reviewed via github pull requests
tarballs for non-opam non-github libraries are stored in a separate git repository (that can be blown away if history gets too big)
bleeding-edge libraries existing on github are forked into our github account and installed via our own local opam package
Use of OCaml:
OCaml will not compensate for bad programming practices; teaching good taste is beyond the scope of this answer. http://ocaml.org/learn/tutorials/guidelines.html is a good starting point.
OCaml 4.01.0 makes it much easier than before to reuse record field labels and variant constructors (i.e. type t1 = {x:int} type t2 = {x:int;y:int} let t1_of_t2 ({x}:t2) : t1 = {x} now works)
we try to not use camlp4 syntax extensions in our own code
we do not use classes and objects unless mandated by some external library
in theory since OCaml 4.01.0 we should prefer classic variants over polymorphic variants
we use exceptions to indicate errors and let them go through happily until our main server loop catches them and interprets them as "internal error" (default), "bad request", or something else
exceptions such as Exit or Not_found can be used locally when it makes sense, but in module interfaces we prefer to use options.
Libraries, protocols, frameworks:
we use Batteries for all commodity functions that are missing from OCaml's standard library; for the rest we have a "util" library
we use Lwt for asynchronous programming, without the syntax extensions, and the bind operator (>>=) is the only operator that we use (if you have to know, we do reluctantly use camlp4 preprocessing for better exception tracking on bind points).
we use HTTP and JSON to communicate with 3rd-party software and we expect every modern service to provide such APIs
for serving HTTP, we run our own SCGI server (ocaml-scgi) behind nginx
as an HTTP client we use Cohttp
for JSON serialization we use atdgen
"Cloud" services:
we use quite a lot of them as they are usually cheap, easy to interact with, and solve scalability and maintenance problems for us.
Testing:
we have one make/omake target for fast tests and one for slow tests
fast tests are unit tests; each module may provide a "test" function; a test.ml file runs the list of tests
slow tests are those that involve running multiple services; these are crafted specifically for our project, but they cover as much as possible as a production service. Everything runs locally either on Linux or MacOS, except for cloud services for which we find ways to not interfere with production.
Setting this all up is quite a bit of work, especially for someone not familiar with OCaml. There is no framework taking care of all that yet, but at least you get the choice of the tools.
OASIS
To add to Pavel answer:
Disclaimer: I am the author of OASIS.
OASIS also has oasis2opam that can help to create OPAM package quickly and oasis2debian to create Debian packages. This is extremly useful if you want to create a 'release' target that automate most of the tasks to upload a package.
OASIS is also shipped with a script called oasis-dist.ml that creates automatically tarball for upload.
Look all this in https://github.com/ocaml.org.
Testing
I use OUnit to do all my tests. This is simple and pretty efficient if you are used to xUnit testing.
Source control/management
Disclaimer: I am the owner/maintainer of forge.ocamlcore.org (aka forge.o.o)
If you want to use git, I recommend to use github. This is really efficient for review.
If you use darcs or subversion, you can create an account on forge.o.o.
In both case having a public mailing list where you send all commit notification is a must have, so that everyone can see them and review them. You can use either Google groups or a mailing list on forge.o.o.
I recommend to have a nice web (github or forge.o.o) page with OCamldoc documentation build everytime you commit. If you have a huge code base this will help you to use the OCamldoc generated documentation right from the beginning (and fix it quickly).
I recommend to create tarballs when you reach a stable stage. Don't just rely on checking out the latest git/svn version. This tip has saved me hours of work in the past. As said by Martin, store all your tarballs in a central place (a git repository is a good idea for that).
This one probably doesn't answer your question completely, but here is my experience regarding build environment:
I really appreciate OASIS. It has a nice set of features, helping not only to build the project, but also to write documentation and support test environment.
Build system
OASIS generates setup.ml file from the specification (_oasis file), which works basically as a building script. It accepts -configure, -build, -test, -distclean flags. I quite used to them while working with different GNU and other projects that usually use Makefiles and I find it convenient that it is possible to use all of them automatically here.
Makefiles. Instead of generating setup.ml, it is also possible to generate Makefile with all options described above available.
Structure
Usually my project that is built by OASIS has at least three directories: src, _build, scripts and tests.
In the former directory all source files are stored in one directory: source (.ml) and interface (.mli) files are stored together. May be if the project is too large, it is worth introducing more subdirectories.
The _build directory is under the influence of OASIS build system. It stores both source and object files there and I like that build files are not interfered with source files, so I can easily delete it in case something goes wrong.
I store multiple shell scripts in the scripts directory. Some of them are for test execution and interface file generation.
All input and output files for tests I store in a separate directory.
Interfaces/Documentation
The use of interface files (.mli) has both advantages and drawbacks for me. It really helps to find type errors, but if you have them, you have to edit them as well when making changes or improvements in your code. Sometimes forgetting this causes nasty errors.
But the main reason why I like interface files is documentation. I use ocamldoc to generate (OASIS supports this feature with -doc flag) html pages with documentation automatically. In my opinion it is enough to write comments describing each function in the interface and not to insert comments in the middle of code. In OCaml functions are usually short and concise and if there is a necessity to insert extra comments there, may be it is better to split the function.
Also be aware of -i flag for ocamlc. The compiler can automatically generate interface file for a module.
Tests
I didn't find a reasonable solution for supporting tests (I would like to have some ocamltest application), that's why I am using my own scripts for executing and verifying use cases. Fortunately, OASIS supports executing custom commands when setup.ml is run with -test flag.
I don't use OASIS for a long time and if anyone knows any other cool features, I would like also to know about them.
Also, it you are not aware of OPAM, it is definitely worth looking at. Without it installing and managing new packages is a nightmare.

What use does ./configure serve (other than checking dependencies)

Why does every source package that uses a makefile come with a ./configure script, what does it do? As far as I can tell, it actually generates the makefile?
Is there anything that can't be done in the makefile?
configure is usually a result of the 'autoconf' system. It can generate headers, makefiles, really anything. 'Usually,' since some are hand-crafted.
The reason for these things is to allow source code to be compiled in disparate environments. There are many variations on Unix / Linux, with slightly different system headers and libraries. configure scripts allow code to auto-adapt.
The configure step is a sort of meta build. It generates the makefile that will work on the specific hardware / distribution you're running. For instance it determines the name of the C or C++ compiler and embeds that in the makefile.
The configure step will also frequently take a set of parameters, the values of which may determine what libraries need to be linked against. For instance if you compile Apache HTTP with SSL enabled it needs to link against more shared libraries than if you don't. Since linking is handled by the makefile, you need an extra step to create a custom makefile (rather than requiring the make command to require dozens or hundreds of options.
Everything can be done from within the makefile but some build systems were implemented otherwise.
I don't personally use configure files for my projects but I admit I mostly export Erlang & Python based projects.
I don't think of the makefile as a script, I think of it as an input to the make utility.
The configure script (as its name suggests) configures the makefile, including as you say resolving dependencies.
If only from the idea of avoiding self-modifying code, the things in the configure script don't really belong in the makefile.
the point is that autoconf autohdr automake form an integrated system the makes cross platform building on unix relatively str8forward. THe docs are really bad and there are lots of horrible gotchas but on the other hand there are a lot of working samples
When I first came across this stuff I thought - "ha I can do that with a nice clean makefile" and proceeded to rework the source that way. Big mistake. Learn to write and edit configure.ac and makefile.am files, you will be happy in the end
To answer your question. Configure is good for
is function foo available on this platform and if so which include and library do I need
letting the builder choose if they want feature wizzbang included in a nice simple consistent way

Resources