Incremental Compiler - Features

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Friends, we have already discussed in detail about Compilers. Today we shall discuss about Incremental Compiler. As you know when you compile a program it undergoes into several phases. That means it take some time for compilation. Assume that you have five thousand lines of code and it takes 5 minutes to compile (in real life it wont take that much time, just assume). You have a small error from line 450 to line 480. Now you have modified these lines. Now using the normal compilation process you have to re compile the whole program again. That means unnecessarily you are compiling all the five thousand lines for the sake of 30 lines. What if you can simply compile those 30 lines of code and add it to the already compiled version of 4970 lines of code? That's the logic behind the incremental compiler.

The Incremental Compiler is such a compilation scheme in which only modified source text gets recompiled and merged with previously compiled code to form a new target code. Thus incremental compiler avoids recompilation of the whole source code on some modification. Rather only modified portion of source program gets recompiled.

Here are various features of incremental compiler

1. During program development process modifications to source program can cause recompilation of whole source text. This overhead is reduced in incremental compiler.
2. Run time errors can be patched up just like compile time errors by keeping program modification as it is.
3. The compilation process is faster.
4. Handling batch programs become very flexible using incremental compiler.
5. In incremental compiler program structure table is maintained for memory allocation of target code. When a new statement is compiled the new entry for it is created in program structure table. Thus memory allocation required for incremental compiler need not be contiguous.

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