Toward a progress indicator for program compilation

For user-friendliness purposes, many modern software systems provide progress indicators for longrunning tasks. These progress indicators continuously estimate the percentage of the task that has been completed and when the task will finish. However, none of the existing program compilation tools provide a non-trivial progress indicator, although it often takes minutes or hours to build a large program. In this paper, we investigate the problem of supporting such progress indicators. We first discuss the goals and challenges inherent in this problem. Then we present a set of techniques that are sufficient for implementing a simple yet useful progress indicator for program compilation. Finally, we report on an initial implementation of these techniques in GNU Make. Copyright c © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.