[CMake] makefile generator

[Jesper Eskilson]

Hi all,

I'm curious about the design of the current makefile generator, and
why it was designed the way it was. I've tried searching the mailing
list archive, but without any greater success.

One question pops to mind: why invoke use so many levels of recursive
make? I counted at least three levels on my project, where the leaf
make process only compiles a single file (!), where each make process
does the complete phase of parsing, building up a dependency tree,
etc. I believe GNU make is smart enough to not start a new process for
each recursive make, but NMake is definitely not. A ran a quick and
simple benchmark, showing that the overhead for each nmake invokation
is at least 0.1-0.2 seconds, which for large projects quickly scales
up to minutes.

Why use recursive make calls at all?

-- 
/Jesper