DMD Source Archive - Why?

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Tuesday, 9 April 2024 at 18:49:21 UTC, Paolo Invernizzi wrote:
> On Tuesday, 9 April 2024 at 17:19:41 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 4/4/2024 4:12 AM, Paolo Invernizzi wrote:
>>> My 2 cents: there will be NO advantages in compilation time.
>>
>> Unfortunately, some things cannot be benchmarked until they 
>> are built.
>
> Exactly, mine It's a bet ... but hey, I'll be happy to lost it, 
> of course!

I will also bet that any difference in compile time will be 
extremely insignificant. I don't bet against decades of 
filesystem read optimizations. Saving e.g. microseconds on a 1.5 
second build isn't going to move the needle.

I did reduce stats semi-recently for DMD and saved a significant 
percentage of stats, I don't really think it saved insane amounts 
of time. It was more of a "oh, I thought of a better way to do 
this". I think at the time, there was some resistance to adding 
more stats to the compiler due to the same misguided optimization 
beliefs, and so I started looking at it. If reducing stats by 90% 
wasn't significant, reducing them again likely isn't going to be 
noticed.

See https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/14582

The only benefit I might see in this is to *manage* the source as 
one item. But I don't really know that we need a new custom 
format. `tar` is pretty simple. ARSD has a tar implementation 
that I lifted for my raylib-d installer which allows reading tar 
files with about [100 lines of 
code](https://github.com/schveiguy/raylib-d/blob/9906279494f1f83b2c4c9550779d46962af7c342/install/source/app.d#L22-L132).

-Steve