Undefined Value

The developers of SCons don't seem to be very interested in this, but I've found a way to dramatically speed up SCons builds for MSVC8 (Visual Studio 2005's C++ compiler).

We've got a fairly big codebase with a few levels. It was taking over a minute to read all the SConstruct/SConscript files, even when there was nothing to do.

I ran the profiler, and found that the bulk of the time was in minidom.py and expatbuilder.py. This was surprising, because I didn't think SCons used XML.

Searching further, it turns out that for MSVC8, to determine library and include paths SCons opens a registry key which contains XML, and parses it. For our codebase, it was doing this about 300 times per build.

So, I hacked up my personal copy of SCons/Tool/msvc.py, and now instead of over a minute, it only takes 20 seconds. I don't consider this a "patch", because I don't really know much about SCons internals, and so this could be totally wrong, but maybe someone can figure out the right way to do what I have done and get it into CVS.

The idea is to cache the results of _get_msvc8_path, so that the XML parsing doesn't happen every time. I added a global variable to msvc.py, containing an empty dictionary:

# START NEW CODE
# KDJ: cache results of _get_msvc8_path in a dictionary
cached_msvc8_path = {}
# END NEW CODE

Then, I changed a few lines in get_msvc_path as follows:

    if version_num >= 8.0:
        # ORIGINAL: return _get_msvc8_path(path, str(version_num), platform, suite)
        # START NEW CODE
        global cached_msvc8_path
        if not cached_msvc8_path.has_key(path):
            cached_msvc8_path[path] = _get_msvc8_path(path, str(version_num), platform, suite)
        return cached_msvc8_path[path]
        # END NEW CODE
    elif version_num >= 7.0:
        return _get_msvc7_path(path, str(version_num), platform)