Design and Implementation of Parallel Make

摘要

MAKE is the standard UNIX utility for maintaining programs. UNIX programmers have been using it for almost 10 years, and many UNIX programs nowadays are maintained by it. The strength of MAKE is that it allows the user to specify how to compile program components, and that the system, after an update, is regenerated according to the specification and with minimum number of recompilations. With the appearance of multiple processor systems, the time needed to 'make' a program, or target, can effectively be reduced. Although the hardware provides parallelism, few tools are able to exploit the parallelism. The introduction of parallelism to MAKE is the subject of the paper. A parallel MAKE is described and an analysis of its performance is given.