S60 Open to new features

So I've talked about the improvements we made in our build system in earlier articles. These include

1. Allowing the compiler to do the dependency tracking
2. Tracking changes to the mmp (and bld.inf).
3. Allow multiple jobs to be spawned by setting the Make environment variable to "make -j N" to allow the make rules to run concurrently in multiiple jobs and thus the compilation time will be faster.
4. Allow the user to turn on the Eclipse incremental builder to determine if anything has changed in the workspace.

But how much faster? We did some example benchmarking to give us an idea.

In the third part of this series of articles I want to tallk about a problem customers ran into during the beta cycle when using the dependency tracking of the Carbide 1.3 build system and how we tackled that problem. It resulted in the next major improvement in the build system.

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Another build issue we addressed in Carbide 1.3 was a performance issue concerning compile times when compared to CodeWarrior. CodeWarrior has an option to run compiles concurrently, which reduced overall build time signficantly. Make has a similar feature which can be enabled with the -j switch. When specified it will run the make rules concurrently in multiple jobs and thus the compilation time will be faster. This works on multi-core and hyper-threaded machines.

The Carbide.c++ 1.3 builder depends on the underlying Symbian OS command line. But the Symbian command line system had some limitations and problems that were addressed to improve performance and make it simpler for the user to build his project. What were some of these improvements we did to make a better build system? Let's talk about them now.

The Console view may be one of the most overused views in Carbide. So we know a lot of information is output to the Console view, but did you know there are at least 10 different consoles to look at? I didn't know until I started to add their names to the Console view page in the Carbide manual.