Powershell scripts are significantly slowing down the build about pinvoke HOT 2 CLOSED

@AArnott,

I did some benchmarking to the build process and here are the results:

Tests
To run the build (from command line) with and without the Create-PInvokeTxtFile.ps1 script and then with a dummy version of the powersell scrtipt whose sole job is to output a text to the MSBuild log, and hence removing the reflection algorithm from the build time.

Hardware
Processor: Intel Core i7-4712Q CPU @ 2.30GHz 2.30GHz
Memory Ram: 16 GB
System Type: 64-bit OS

MSBuild single process

MSBuild concurrent processes (/m switch 8 cores)

The fact that MSBuild spawn powershell once per project using the PInvoke.Extra.targets makes the build process time two times slower (regardless of the process time to generate the LIBNAME.pinvokes.txt file).

We should consider to generate the LIBNAME.pinvokes.txt files at the end of the build process, and change the process in such a way that powershell is loaded just one time to generate the files for all dlls.

Thoughts?

from pinvoke.

MSBuild doesn't provide a way to do something at the end of a build process like that. But we could remove the Target that does the work from the standard Build pipeline so that you have to run some other target for it to do the work. Alternatively, we could put a Condition attribute on the target itself so that although it's part of Build, it only does something when MSBuild is run from the command line with /p:GeneratePInvokesTxt=true. I'm leaning toward that option.

from pinvoke.