[racket-dev] Compiling tests

Yesterday, Robby Findler wrote:
> This has caused me some trouble and I'm not sure it is a good way to
> go, in general. Specifically, I'd like to think that our newer tests
> will more and more be things we'd want to compile. 
> 
> My desire to compile the tests is the same reason I want to compile
> any Racket file: so it loads faster.

(To be clear, you're not talking about any other benefits besides
being able to run your tests faster, right?  Since drdr (or the
nightly build, for those tests) will still run them and report.)

This sounds like a very minor damage: it's only you who wants to run
your tests, and even that happens only when you're testing...  It
seems that the benefit is also a minor improvement in tree setup
speed, but that one is done much more frequently, and by much more
people, so we get:  minor ⋘ minor * much².  Even more: I think that in
all cases that I ran test code, it happens while I'm editing the code
that is tested and/or the tests -- so I don't even get that small
benefit in my workflow.

In any case, I have no principle objection here...  For the nightly
build (and for my own builds), I can easily just hack it to add the
`compile-omit-paths' definition before it builds the tree -- but given
the above, I think that most people would prefer to enjoy the shorter
build times.  (Kind of obvious when most people don't run these tests
on a regular basis.)  If not, I'll do that hack.

Alternatively, add a flag to setup that is similar to `-D' to omit
compiling tests (and have it on by default).


> So, I'd like to go back to the old way: I can try disabling eopl
> tests and look at any other problematic collections if that would
> help with your original concern in a different way.

[The problem with that approach is that new collections are being
added when nobody's looking, and having no global `compile-omit-paths'
means that they get compiled by default.  So I'd rather go with the
above hack than go back to selective exclusions.]

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!