I’ve been working steadily on the incremental compiler project these last couple of months, but not blogging about it. So, time for a status report.

I made a branch in the GCC repository, cleaned up my existing patches, and checked it all in. There’s a short web page describing the project on the GCC wiki (branch details there).

I’ve also written a rough draft of the support code for “decl smashing”, and also changed the parser to consider “per-declaration hunks”.

The idea behind per-declaration hunks is that, for code written by the user, we get better incremental behavior if we consider each hunk to hold a single declaration or definition, rather than the previous rule of “everything between two file change events”. The former is better because it means that a change is isolated to its containing declaration and uses of that declaration (and we can do even better here, perhaps, with a bit more analysis); the latter is better for system headers and the like because it has lower overhead.

Finally, I’ve started server-izing GCC. This part should be ready for real testing pretty soon.