aperezdc / popsicle

Toolchain tarball creator for Icecream

Popsicle 🍧

Popsicle creates toolchain tarballs for Icecream (also known as IceCC).

If you have ever been frustrated by the slowness and feebleness of the icecc-create-env script included as part of Icecream, then Popsicle is for you:

• Popsicle is smart enough to detect compilers that point to ccache, and it will figure out by itself where to find the actual location of the program.
• Generated toolchain tarballs will be cached and reused. When any file from the tarball is changed (or any of its dependencies), it will be recreated on demand.
• The popsicle program is stand-alone and does not have external dependencies other than the compilers it will package.

Both GCC and Clang are supported.

Building

You will need a stable version of the Rust compiler and tools, including Cargo:

git clone https://github.com/aperezdc/popsicle && cd $_
cargo build --release

Using

Popsicle assembles and caches a tarball with all the tools needed for compilation, including —but not limited to— the dependency libraries. Generated tarballs will be cached under $XDG_CACHE_HOME (typically ~/.cache), and reused whenever possible:

aperez@momiji ~ % popsicle gcc
/home/aperez/.cache/popsicle/gcc/gcc-7.2.0.tar.gz

As shown above, the full path to the toolchain tarball is printed. The output from Popsicle can be used to set $ICECC_VERSION directly:

# Create a toolchain tarball (if needed) and get its location.
export ICECC_VERSION=$(popsicle gcc)

# Now compile some big project.
PATH="/usr/lib/ccache:${PATH}" CCACHE_PREFIX=/usr/bin/icecc make CC=gcc -j50

This is indeed the kind of usage for which Popsicle was designed.

Licensing

Distributed under the terms of the MIT license.