[fpc-devel] Unit dependencies

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Wed, 4 Feb 2026, Adriaan van Os via fpc-devel wrote:

> Sven Barth via fpc-devel wrote:
>
>>     Another question. Has anybody considered running the external
>>     assembly (e.g. on macOS) in a
>>     separate process ? That would greatly reduce build times of large
>>     projects.
>> 
>> 
>> Ehm... The external assembly *is* run in a separate process, that's the 
>> point of it being *external*. 
>
> You are right, of course. What I mean is — is the compiler waiting for that 
> process to finiish ? It 
> would have to wait before starting the linking phase, but not before starting 
> compiling other units.

It would make the logic quite complex. 
Not all platforms can handle this, sometimes the internal assembler is used, 
you have to make sure not to launch 200 assembler processes at once etc.
The current approach has the advantage of simplicity.

Traditionally, make is used to parallelize (and fpmake supports it).

Michael.