Doing support work in #gentoo-it is probably one of the most user-facing tasks I’ve been doing lately, it’s nice because you can often gather common misconceptions about problems and tools.
One of these is related to ccache. Some users seem to think that ccache will improve their compile speed in any situation. This couldn’t be more wrong.
First of all, in the situation of an always different source file, ccache will make build take a longer time than a non-cached build. The reason is pretty simple once you think of it. The cache is indexed by an hash, the md5 of the preprocessed source file; and the content of the cache is the resulting object file. When you build a given source file, ccache will have to take an md5 hash of the preprocessor’s result. Then it should look for it on the cache tree, and if it’s not found, it will have to compile it and write the output twice (once as the output of the build and once in the cache). It might not be a huge overhead but it’s an overhead nonetheless.
So there has to be a benefit to use ccache for it to be useful. The benefit is that, when you build the same sources twice, the hash, lookup and copy takes less time than the build, usually. But when do you actually build the same sources twice?
The first myth to debunk is that it’s helpful for packages using libtool as they build sources twice (one PIC and one non-PIC). While it’s true they build the same sources twice, they are not compiled in the same way, so the cache is not saving anything. If they were built the same way, there would be no reason to actually build it twice, no?
The second is that ccache helps when you change your CFLAGS. The idea of ccache is that it gives you the exact output the compiler would give you. And this means that changing CFLAGS will change the resulting output too. If it was ignoring the change in CFLAGS and returning data from cache it would be breaking your setup by disallowing you to change CFLAGS. Again, ccache is not helping you.
The third myth is that ccache makes changing USE flags a matter of seconds rather than hours. While it’s true that this is a case where commonly you do have an advantage on using ccache, it’s not that simple. Changing USE flags usually means changing the compiled code; there are rare cases (like xorg-server PDEPENDs) that allows you to keep the same exact sources when changing USE flags.
Even then, if you change versions of the libraries used by the software, then the preprocessed sources will change, and we’re back to square one.
All in all, ccache is not bad, it’s helpful in various situations, it’s quite useful for developers. But it’s not a panacea for Gentoo users.