Re: synchronous M-x compile?

[Nikolaj Schumacher <me@nschum.de>]

Dan Davison <davison@stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:

> Is there a simple way to alter this behaviour so that compile happens
> synchronously

Are you sure you need to make it synchronous?  You could just add the
code that uses the result to `compilation-finish-functions'.

> As an aside, I guess that the motivation for asynchronous compile is
> the time taken for compilation? This has obviously decreased a lot
> during the life of emacs and I wonder what the distribution of compile
> times looks like now for emacs users?

Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.
(Wirth's Law) :)

But seriously.  Of course compilations have become faster.  Some
environments even offer real-time compilation while typing code.  But
even if it did only take a few seconds, what advantage would locking the
entire user interface have?  Asynchronous processes come at a small
price.

On the bright side, you can jump to the first error as soon as it
appears while the compiler is munching away on other files.

Since your interested, the average incremental compile time on my
current one-man project is about 30s, on a fairly new laptop.


regards,
Nikolaj Schumacher