[Rake-devel] Rake 0.9.3.beta.2 with -j option

[Jim Weirich]

On Oct 23, 2012, at 4:54 PM, Mark Watson <watsonmw at gmail.com> wrote:

> What about having the old code called by default and if you specify -j
> the new parallel code is executed?  That way old rakefiles still work,
> and new ones can take advantage of the -j feature

So you check out a new project from GitHub and decide to run rake on it.  How do you decide if its safe to run with -j or not?  Try it and see?  Wait for subtle unreproducible race conditions to manifest?

> (after all that was good enough for GNUmake). 

GNUMake mainly deals with shelling out to commands.  I suspect Rakefiles that mainly shell out to compilers and linkers will have little problem with -j.

It's the Rakefiles that execute significant Ruby code in process that I'm concerned about.  And maybe I'm overly concerned about this issue, but I've dealt with real-time systems and multiple threads in a past life and know how tricky it can be to get things right.[1]

-- 
-- Jim Weirich
-- jim.weirich at gmail.com

[1] Ask me sometime about my 1 in a million failure.