Awesome

gpm-prebuild: A prebuilder plugin for GPM

For any sizeable project, Go compilation time is just soooo long. Sometimes a build can take upwards of 10 seconds! But you can cut that time down.

This is a plugin for GPM that runs a go build on all of your dependencies in the $GOPATH. If you are using a per-project $GOPATH (the standard way of using GVP) then prebuilding is a simple way of improving performance.

Installing

Run make install. This will hopefully be in the GPM plugin homebrew repository soon, too.

Typical usage pattern

Typically this is run right after a gpm install

$ cd my_go_project
$ source gvp in
$ gpm install
$ gpm prebuild
# And edit away!

If you also use gpm-git, you can prebuild those dependencies with gpm prebuild git.

If at any point you need to get rid of those pesky .a files, just do a gpm prebuild clean.

Why did you write this crazy thing?

While Go really does build very quickly, there are practical cases where increasing compilation speed is desireable.

Here's what prompted me to write this plugin: I use vim with syntax checking. My syntax checker runs each time I write (:w, etc) the file. And I save often. On a sizeable project, I had to wait several seconds between when I hit :w and when my editor became active again.

The cause of this is that a few of my dependency libraries are very, very large, and were being re-compiled from scratch with each document save.

The solution: Prebuild the packages. This cut my go build time down to the point where I don't notice any lag.