Building LLVM and GCC, with Amake

Abstract

This paper describes the author's exploratory experience of porting the build systems of two large software distributions, the LLVM and GCC programming-language translation systems, to the Amake build tool. Amake is an enhanced derivative of GNU Make. Amake adds automatic language-independent dependency analysis and site-wide heterogeneous target caching. Amake also supports GNU Make's parallel-build capabilities. This experience included (mostly) expected changes to these build systems, but somewhat surprising changes to the design and implementation of Amake. A description of the former is hoped to encourage the migration of other build systems to Amake; the latter is Amake's latest set of improvements.