Transparent remote development and compilation

Details

Supervisors

Mens, Kim

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [60] en sciences informatiques

Abstract

This master thesis – Transparent remote development and compilation – tries to solve an issue that is bound to become more prominent as software becomes even more ubiquitous. The size of the software is certainly going to increase. Not only will the number of lines of code grow, but the size of the environment, as well as the size of the development teams. To curb the cost that will assuredly incur from this growth, this thesis focus on reducing network and space cost by limiting the asset downloaded by each devel- oper. As developer often times work on a limited number of files, it is a good idea to only make those available local while the other remains on the common repository. This thesis is in collaboration with Raincode, a compiler company. To this effect, this solution will work with their compiler. The solution proposed is to create files that symbolically link to the real ones. Using a set of tools created for this thesis, repositories are created such that a local repository with redirect files that link to the real files is entirely present locally while the real repository is only partially available locally. With the help of a Visual Studio extension created specifically for this work, developers can interact with redirect files and acquire the real files that will be worked on. Those files can then be uploaded using said extension. The compiler can acquire files on an individual basis as it needs them for the compilation. The tools developed for this work prove to be enough to fulfil a basic workflow for developers with extension, as well as a compilation workflow for the Raincode compiler.