SparkBuild — Fast, Reliable Developer Builds

One of SparkBuild's key features is the subbuild technology, which helps developers avoid wasting time on unnecessary builds. Tools like ccache and ClearCase winkins have co-opted the term "build avoidance," but in fact they do object reuse, not build avoidance, and are not always effective for developer builds. Subbuilds are a simple yet effective approach to build avoidance, and are much faster than object reuse.

Subbuilds are an improvement on standard incremental build technology. Instead of checking the whole build for up-to-date status, and then rebuilding just what has changed, our technology uses a pre-existing 'map' to determine what parts of the code are needed to produce the target you're trying to build, and then performs an incremental build on just those pieces. This skips a lot of makefile parsing, stating, and always-run rules for irrelevant components, and leads to 6X or better speed improvements with no additional hardware required. As an added benefit of subbuilds, that 'map' lets you build from a subdirectory and still get the behavior of an incremental 'from the top'.

SparkBuild features powerful analytics based on the commercial ElectricInsight product help developers troubleshoot builds at a glance. SparkBuild Insight uses information recorded during the execution of your build to profile its structure and results. This data is used to provide clear insight into the build process, making it simple to identify component relationships, failure causes, and opportunities for optimization.

It gives you a visual environment to rapidly discover build outcomes — instantly identifying specific targets which failed and tracing back to the originating makefile rules — as well as graphical reports that show where your build time is being spent, whether in compilation, file I/O, linking, or other classifications. With this information, making decisions on how to best solve performance bottlenecks, identifying the right place to make structural modifications, and resolving integration issues with new changes and components is straightforward and easy.