<rant> D's makefiles... </rant>

[John Colvin via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 14 April 2015 at 12:07:18 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Tue, 2015-04-14 at 08:53 +0000, Atila Neves via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> 
> […]
>> The "-j" option should be there for tweaking only, by default 
>> I expect a modern tool to just use as many threads as I have 
>> cores. Which of course is exactly what Ninja does.
>
> N-1 not N on a system you are using as a workstation. N on a 
> compiler
> server, no problem.
>
> Waf chooses N and it makes the workstation unusable whilst the
> compilation is happening.
> […]

That really depends on how your process/thread scheduler is set 
up. I often work with all my cores maxed out, the UI all runs 
smooth enough, but that's on OS X. On linux I occasionally ran in 
to a bit of slowness with firefox, but terminals, vim, emacs etc. 
all worked fine, but then that's with xmonad as a WM, so perhaps 
my experience isn't typical.

Also, I have often got faster compile-times using more more 
processes than cores, which I put down to disk latency hiding but 
I could be wrong.