When I make a change to a file in the swift compiler, it often only takes a few seconds to re-compile and re-link swiftc. The build script also builds several other things so I find myself often stopping it early. Is there a way to only rebuild the compiler?
PS is there a better place for topics like this? If I just have a quick question about the build script or something similar should I create a whole forum post? Is there an IRC channel or something that would be better suited for issues like these?
I think the way most of us do this is to build the specific targets we are interested in using the underlying build tool instead of build-script. For example, if you are building with ninja, you can rebuild just the compiler (paths are for build-script --release-debuginfo on macOS).
cd ../build/Ninja-RelWithDebInfoAssert/swift-macosx-x86_64
ninja swift
To run tests, I have "lit.py" in my PATH. You can find it inside the llvm/utils/lit source directory.