ABC: Accelerated Building of C/C++ Projects

Software building is recurring and time-consuming. Based on the finding that a significant portion of compilations in incremental build is unnecessary, we propose by path compilation, an efficient build technique that avoids unnecessary recompilation with automated detection of redundant dependencies and unessential changes in source files. The technique is lightweight and transparent to software developers, and can be easily applied to existing build systems. We evaluated our approach on a set of real-world open source projects. The results show that 83% ~ 97% of the recompilations are unnecessary and our approach can accelerate the incremental build up to 44.20%.