A macroscopic profile of program compilation and linking

To profile the changes made to programs during development and maintenance, the authors have instrumented the ´make´ utility that is used to compile and link programs. With minor modifications, they have used ´make´ to find out how much time programmers spend waiting for compiling and linking, how many modules are compiled each time a program is linked, and the change in size of the compiled modules. Measurements show that most programs are relinked after only one or two modules are recompiled, and that over 90% of all recompilations yield object code that is less than 100 bytes larger in size. The authors are using these results to guide the design of an incremental programming environment, particularly with respect to an incremental linker.<>