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Toward a progress indicator for program compilation
Author(s) -
Luo Gang,
Chen Tong,
Yu Hao
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
software: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.437
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1097-024X
pISSN - 0038-0644
DOI - 10.1002/spe.792
Subject(s) - computer science , task (project management) , set (abstract data type) , simple (philosophy) , software engineering , software , data science , systems engineering , programming language , engineering , philosophy , epistemology
Abstract For user‐friendliness purposes, many modern software systems provide progress indicators for long‐running tasks. These progress indicators continuously estimate the percentage of the task that has been completed and when the task will finish. However, none of the existing program compilation tools provide a non‐trivial progress indicator, although it often takes minutes or hours to build a large program. In this paper, we investigate the problem of supporting such progress indicators. We first discuss the goals and challenges inherent in this problem. Then we present a set of techniques that are sufficient for implementing a simple yet useful progress indicator for program compilation. Finally, we report on an initial implementation of these techniques in GNU Make. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.