August 17, 2021

60: Compile Faster with Marc-André Lafortune

43 minutes

We talk with Marc-André Lafortune about reducing Elixir project compile times. On larger projects, when a single file like a view template is changed and over 100 files get recompiled, there is something wrong. Marc-André explains how he identified the problems in his project and contributed to Elixir’s mix xref tool making it easier for us to find those problems in our own projects! We cover how these tooling improvements were used to improve the upcoming Phoenix 1.6 and Elixir 1.13! An additional mix xref flag was added to run CI checks on our code to prevent accidentally adding code that slows our compile times.

Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/60

Elixir Community News

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted-language-love-dread – Elixir is number 4 among the "most loved" languages on Stack Overflow's developer survey

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#section-top-paying-technologies-top-paying-technologies – Elixir is number 3 in highest paid languages on Stack Overflow's developer survey

https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter/pull/1645 – Neovim adds tree-sitter (a syntax parser) support for the Surface library

https://github.com/surface-ui/surface_tailwind/issues/1#issuecomment-884981076 – Surface Catalogue to continue and may redesign the UI using TailwindCSS

https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/issues/4403#issuecomment-895354673 – Phoenix 1.6 possibly released this week?

Do you have some Elixir news to share? Tell us at @ThinkingElixir or email at [email protected]

Discussion Resources

https://twitter.com/josevalim/status/1421912595456569351 – Thread talks about the change

https://groups.google.com/g/elixir-lang-core/c/Hmg5y8S3v4E/m/FVK50RWBAQAJ?pli=1 – Elixir core mailing list where feature was discussed

https://hexdocs.pm/mix/master/Mix.Tasks.Xref.html#module-understanding-the-printed-graph

https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/pull/11044 – Add "--label compile-connected" option to mix xref graph

https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/pull/11048 – Add "--fail-above" option to mix xref making it good for CI systems

https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/pull/11049 – Support multiple sinks and sources in mix xref graph

https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/pull/11162 – Update docs

https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/pull/11080 – Rely on modification time and hash to determine modified sources

https://dashbit.co/blog/speeding-up-re-compilation-of-elixir-projects – Blog post on recompilations

https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/issues/4408 – Example 1 of sneaky macros introducing compile-time dependencies

https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/issues/4409 – Example 2 of sneaky macros introducing compile-time dependencies

https://exercism.io/tracks/elixir

https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv

https://rvm.io/

https://www.super.mx/

https://xkcd.com/303/

--label compile-connected

--fail-above

Guest Information

https://twitter.com/malafortune – on Twitter

https://github.com/marcandre/ – on Github

http://blog.marc-andre.ca/ – Blog

Find us online

Message the show - @ThinkingElixir

Email the show - [email protected]

Mark Ericksen - @brainlid

David Bernheisel - @bernheisel

Cade Ward - @cadebward

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