Patch: Speed up NetBeans IDE execution

[Doug Simon]

Hi Jaroslav,

> On Mar 11, 2015, at 11:52 AM, Jaroslav Tulach <jaroslav.tulach at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi.
> I am using Graal with NetBeans and found various operations (rebuild of a 
> single module, execution) too slow. I believe the reason is that NetBeans try 
> to ensure all dependant projects are up-to-date. I guess this is unnecessary.

Ideally, an IDE should ensure all dependents are up to date when the project they depend on changes. Unfortunately, this is a little slow in Netbeans since it out-souces the updating to ant which isn’t very incremental.

> The usual workflow is to do:
> 
> $ ./mx build
> 
> and only then rebuild individual parts in the IDE, right?

With your patch, this will become the *required* workflow for NetBeans users. The ‘mx build’ step will probably take as long NetBeans doing the updating itself but at least it is an explicit step as opposed to occurring each time one edits a file in NetBeans. In Eclipse, this is all somewhat faster given that it does more precise propagation of updates.

I propose making this setting conditional on a variable in mx/env. Something like:

NETBEANS_UPDATE_DEPENDENTS=false

How does that sound? Of course, the variable would only have an effect when running ‘mx netbeansinit’.

-Doug