[fpc-devel] Forwarded message about FPC statusy

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

Mark Morgan Lloyd schrieb:

> I've got machines which are older than that, but they've almost all got 
> multiple processors. I can't remember the exact timing, but a Sun 
> machine with 16x 80MHz chips would build the Linux kernel in a minute or 
> so, so parallelisation at the  make -j  level can be a big win.

C is very different from Pascal, WRT parallel compilation. C/C++ use 
independent header files, so that *all* modules can be compiled in 
parallel. OPL instead must compile all used units, before compilation of 
a module can proceed. This will at least result in a long startup phase, 
where the basic units are compiled almost sequentially, before parallel 
compilation may begin.

Both languages use similar means for speeding up compilation. C 
compilers use precompiled headers, while Pascal compilers use the 
DCU/PPU files to reduce parsing efforts. This will give C an big kick, 
because preprocessing and parsing the source code is a lot of work. I'm 
not sure about the impact on Pascal, though.

DoDi