RFR: JDK-8244093 Move all IDE support into coherent structure in make directory

[Maurizio Cimadamore]

On 29/04/2020 11:57, Magnus Ihse Bursie wrote:
> So who/what is using the ant build? I thought it was just the IDEA 
> project that generated ant targets. Is it run explicitly using ant by 
> langtool developers? I know for sure it's not used when we build the 
> product in our CI.

As Jan mentioned, the main purpose of the langtools Ant build is to get 
very very fast incremental recompilation. Which happens to be very 
useful when working in an IDE environment, but one can also use it (and 
I've seen people doing that) just from the command line. You can run 
most (all?) of langtools tests by just doing a private langtools build, 
so langtools developers sometimes go down that path.

Now, to be fair, this was much more common in the non-consolidated world 
than it is in the new world, but, as Jan mentioned, Make is currently 
not useful as a replacement for the private langtools build because it 
has to go through the interim step and all that - and doing that, even 
in the face of one line change in one file was taking approx 15s 
recompilation time back when I did the test. So the private build still 
has a purpose.

Maurizio