After making a mistake of replying to a post from 2010 (the link to it: What does it mean to 'touch' a target in make? ), i would like to understand something as a new student for C programming language, who recently learned about the makefile, make command an so on. i've got a question on class about what does the make -t command do, and why should i use it (or not, for the matter).
i understand that make -t only create the files (the relevant ones, from my makefile commands and full script). but why should i ever use it?
i mean, if it is just creating me the files, without actually doing anything with it - why bother?
(I'm using Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS, gcc for compiling, and writing my code in C language)
As mentioned in comments you should pretty much never use this.
It is "useful" in very limited situations such as: you know for a fact that your entire build is is correct and up to date, then something happens such that the timestamps on your files get all messed up. Maybe some tool went in and tweaked a comment in every file (maybe something changed the copyright year in every file), or maybe you copied the build tree somewhere but forgot to preserve the modification time, or whatever.
Then you can run make -t to "bring back" the relative timestamps of your files so that make understands everything is up to date, without actually building anything.
Back in the day when builds were a lot slower and there were more opportunities to mess up timestamps maybe this was more useful.
These days it's better to just run make without -t: yes you'll have to rebuild a bunch of files but it's much safer than assuring make you know that everything is up to date, when you might be wrong.
Related
I'm trying to do a somewhat odd thing that realistically I'm not sure is even possible with current constraints but is outside of my scope of knowledge so it could be. I'll hopefully be able to make everything clear enough in the question, but it will be a little broad in scope, its too big to get detailed.
Anyway, I have a C codebase (we'll call it bar) that is rather large and takes a bit of time to compile. Not a huge deal normally, but now there is a set of files that are changed often and currently the changes can only be confirmed as good after running a compile. Due to the nature of how these are changed it could result in people running multiple compiles in a day, taking quite a lot of time.
What I want to do on a broad scale is only have to actually compile the set of files that might change (about 20, all in 1 directory, we'll call it foo) and have everything else (bar and everything under it except for foo) ready before hand. Initially was looking at .so library for the task, but not positive anymore that's correct. Either way, it still seemed likely to be reasonably possible until I realized that some of the files in directory foo were included by other files in bar. Mostly the files in foo only include files and are kind of the end point, not being included in things. But with a few of them being included I'm not sure what can be done.
My two thoughts are generate a .so library of everything outside of foo that somehow still checks on the needed included files at compile time, or get some kind of general pre-compile set up. Neither of these seem like they would work at a glance, but I very well could be wrong.
A third option, less ideal but better then nothing, is to generate the .so library with everything including any files in foo that are needed at that point, just leaving out the files that aren't included anywhere. It seems like this would work better, though even if it would I'm still not really sure how to go about it.
So basically, is there a way to do what I want to some extent, and if so what is the best method?
Sorry about the broadness of the question, the codebase is too large to provide lots of detail. I will try to edit and add in any information that people think is needed though. Thanks for the help.
A while back I asked a question about this subject and "solved" it by using Cygwin instead with its XWin utility, but I've come back to this issue again since the Xwin utility does not use my GPU and creates a severe bottleneck in simulations as a result. MinGW/MSYS on the other hand DOES use my GPU for rendering, which is a huge help, but there are some rough areas that need smoothing over, specifically with readlink.
Basically, the src/makefile for rebound (https://github.com/hannorein/rebound) says this:
PREDEF+= -D$(shell basename `readlink gravity.c` '.c' | tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]')
PREDEF+= -D$(shell basename `readlink boundaries.c` '.c' | tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]')
PREDEF+= -D$(shell basename `readlink collisions.c` '.c' | tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]')
If my understanding is correct, this is supposed to find which version of gravity, boundaries and collisions I specified, and adds that to PREDEFS so the compiler uses the right versions of gravity, boundaries and collisions. However, it does not seem to work in MSYS. What it ends up spitting out for predefs is this:
-DOPENGL -D.C -D.C -D.C
Obviously it did not get anything back from the code above. This results in a macronames must be identifiers error, of course. I can work around this by adding any of the special options in between readlink and the filename, like -f, for instance, but then it only spits out
-DOPENGL -DGRAVITY -DBOUNDARIES -DCOLLISIONS
Which is not right because it should have extra bits, like so:
-DOPENGL -DGRAVITY_DIRECT -DBOUNDARIES_OPEN -DCOLLISIONS_NONE
Now, if I don't want any special gravity, boundaries or collisions, the workaround is okay, but only because (I'm guessing) it defaults to those if there's nothing special specified after each macroname. But if I DO want something special, like the more efficient gravity tree code, or actual collisions, the shortened name resulting from the workaround will not help it find anything, and so it causes errors in compiling as certain functions it needed from the special files obviously are missing.
And so I'm pretty stuck at the moment. I would like very much to be able to use other codes than the defaults, but MSYS is acting funny with the readlink and not finding the right stuff. As I said, it worked fine in an X windows style compiler. I feel like there must be some library I'm missing or some hidden syntax disconnect I'm overlooking that needs to be accounted for between XWin and non-Xwin compiling, but I can't find anything.
Here's an example of the links it should be reading (at least I think this is what is being read, I'm still learning makefiles):
ln -fs gravity_tree.c ../../src/gravity.c
ln -fs boundaries_open.c ../../src/boundaries.c
ln -fs collisions_none.c ../../src/collisions.c
If anyone can tell me why this would work on an Xwin command line but not MSYS, I'd greatly appreciate it.
Why on earth do you expect readlink to work in MSYS? Where did you even get whatever readlink.exe is being invoked, (if that is what is being executed)? There is no readlink command in a standard MSYS installation. Perhaps you discovered it in MinGW.org's msys-coreutils-ext package? If this is the case, you should note the comment within the description of that package, (as seen via MinGW.org's mingw-get installer):
The msys-coreutils-bin subpackage contains those applications that were historically part of the standard MSYS installation. The associated msys-coreutils-ext subpackage contains the rest of the coreutils applications that have been (nominally) ported to MSYS -- usually these are less often used, and are not guaranteed to work: e.g. 'su.exe', 'chroot.exe' and 'mkfifo.exe' are known to be broken.
and, it seems that we may add readlink.exe to that list of "known to be broken" applications.
It may also be worth noting that readlink is not among the list of supporting tools, which a GNU Coding Standards conforming application is permitted to invoke from either its configure script, or its makefile. Thus, there is little incentive for the MinGW.org developers, (who maintain MSYS), to address the issue of making readlink.exe work, (although patches from an independent developer, with such an incentive, would be welcomed).
As a final qualification, and as one comment on the question notes, ln -s creates copies of files; it does not create symbolic links. How could it? MSYS itself dates from an era when windows didn't support symbolic links ... indeed, even today its support for them is flaky. At the time when MSYS was published, either copying the files, or creating NTFS hard links, was the best compromise MSYS could offer, in the situation where a script invoked ln -s. Consequently, it would become incumbent upon any developer submitting patches to make readlink.exe work, to also address the issue of updating ln.exe, such that it could create the symbolic links, (in an OS version dependent fashion), which readlink.exe would then read.
I'm sorry if this isn't the answer you hoped for, but unless someone devotes some effort into updating MSYS, so that it can make use of the (unreliable) symbolic link feature in more recent windows versions, then you need to find a different approach; current MSYS does not support symbolic links, even if the underlying OS now does.
I've been looking at examples of C code that is compiled for some lesser known processors (like ZPU) using the gcc cross compiler.
Most of the working examples I see assume a certain arquitecture (Memory map and set of peripherals) and simply give you a recipe to compile for these and they work.
However I can find very little information on what needs to modified if you use the same cpu with a different memory map and set of peripherals.
From what I've read. There are two main files that I need to make sure that are done "right". The linker script that is used and the crt0.o (Which if I need to modify means recompiling the crt0.S which is assembler). On this last one, especially I find very little information on what is actually supposed to do (other that setting up reset there is no clear info, and I'm talking conceptually not for an specific processor. Although something for this would also be useful).
Can any one tell me what is the relationship between a the c files for the code of program (bare metal development), the crt0.S (specially why it is needed) and it's relationship with a working linker script?
PD: Answers of the form "read this book" are welcome and I would love them.
PD: I realize this kind of question is usually vague and closed quickly but I don't know where else to turn, so I ask for a bit of leniency.
I have created my very own (very simple) byte code language, and a virtual machine to execute it. It works fine, but now I'd like to use gcc (or any other freely available compiler) to generate byte code for this machine from a normal c program. So the question is, how do I modify or extend gcc so that it can output my own byte code? Note that I do NOT want to compile my byte code to machine code, I want to "compile" c-code to (my own) byte code.
I realize that this is a potentially large question, and it is possible that the best answer is "go look at the gcc source code". I just need some help with how to get started with this. I figure that there must be some articles or books on this subject that could describe the process to add a custom generator to gcc, but I haven't found anything by googling.
I am busy porting gcc to an 8-bit processor we design earlier. I is kind of a difficult task for our machine because it is 8-bit and we have only one accumulator, but if you have more resources it can became easy. This is how we are trying to manage it with gcc 4.9 and using cygwin:
Download gcc 4.9 source
Add your architecture name to config.sub around line 250 look for # Decode aliases for certain CPU-COMPANY combinations. In that list add | my_processor \
In that same file look for # Recognize the basic CPU types with company name. add yourself to the list: | my_processor-* \
Search for the file gcc/config.gcc, in the file look for case ${target} it is around line 880, add yourself in the following way:
;;
my_processor*-*-*)
c_target_objs="my_processor-c.o"
cxx_target_objs="my_processor-c.o"
target_has_targetm_common=no
tmake_file="${tmake_file} my_processor/t-my_processor"
;;
Create a folder gcc-4.9.0\gcc\config\my_processor
Copy files from an existing project and just edit it, or create your own from scratch. In our project we had copied all the files from the msp430 project and edited it all
You should have the following files (not all files are mandatory):
my_processor.c
my_processor.h
my_processor.md
my_processor.opt
my_processor-c.c
my_processor.def
my_processor-protos.h
constraints.md
predicates.md
README.txt
t-my_processor
create a path gcc-4.9.0/build/object
run ../../configure --target=my_processor --prefix=path for my compiler --enable-languages="c"
make
make install
Do a lot of research and debugging.
Have fun.
It is hard work.
For example I also design my own "architecture" with my own byte code and wanted to generate C/C++ code with GCC for it. This is the way how I make it:
At first you should read everything about porting in the manual of GCC.
Also not forget too read GCC Internals.
Read many things about Compilers.
Also look at this question and the answers here.
Google for more information.
Ask yourself if you are really ready.
Be sure to have a very good cafe machine... you will need it.
Start to add machine dependet files to gcc.
Compile gcc in a cross host-target way.
Check the code results in the Hex-Editor.
Do more tests.
Now have fun with your own architecture :D
When you are finished you can use c or c++ only without os-dependet libraries (you have currently no running OS on your architecture) and you should now (if you need it) compile many other libraries with your cross compiler to have a good framework.
PS: LLVM (Clang) is easier to port... maybe you want to start there?
It's not as hard as all that. If your target machine is reasonably like another, take its RTL (?) definitions as a starting point and amend them, then make compile test through the bootstrap stages; rinse and repeat until it works. You probably don't have to write any actual code, just machine definition templates.
I want to run splints whole program analysis on my system. However the system is quite large and different parts are compiled with different compiler defines and include paths. I can see how to convey this information to splint for a single file but I can't figure out how to do it for whole program. Does anyone know a way of doing this?
Assuming you have a Makefile you could create a new target; then you would go through the actual compilation steps to duplicate them using Splint instead of the compiler.
My advice, however, is against the full-program approach. If you can isolate your system into separate parts, I'd rather start by checking them, one by one. Since your program is "quite large", expect a gazillion warnings... for each one of your modules. You will start to get rid of them once you have sprinkled your source code with the appropriate semantic annotations. Good luck! :)