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    rustbuild: Compile rustc twice, not thrice · 7046fea5
    Alex Crichton authored
    This commit switches the rustbuild build system to compiling the
    compiler twice for a normal bootstrap rather than the historical three
    times.
    
    Rust is a bootstrapped language which means that a previous version of
    the compiler is used to build the next version of the compiler. Over
    time, however, we change many parts of compiler artifacts such as the
    metadata format, symbol names, etc. These changes make artifacts from
    one compiler incompatible from another compiler. Consequently if a
    compiler wants to be able to use some artifacts then it itself must have
    compiled the artifacts.
    
    Historically the rustc build system has achieved this by compiling the
    compiler three times:
    
    * An older compiler (stage0) is downloaded to kick off the chain.
    * This compiler now compiles a new compiler (stage1)
    * The stage1 compiler then compiles another compiler (stage2)
    * Finally, the stage2 compiler needs libraries to link against, so it
      compiles all the libraries again.
    
    This entire process amounts in compiling the compiler three times.
    Additionally, this process always guarantees that the Rust source tree
    can compile itself because the stage2 compiler (created by a freshly
    created compiler) would successfully compile itself again. This
    property, ensuring Rust can compile itself, is quite important!
    
    In general, though, this third compilation is not required for general
    purpose development on the compiler. The third compiler (stage2) can
    reuse the libraries that were created during the second compile. In
    other words, the second compilation can produce both a compiler and the
    libraries that compiler will use. These artifacts *must* be compatible
    due to the way plugins work today anyway, and they were created by the
    same source code so they *should* be compatible as well.
    
    So given all that, this commit switches the default build process to
    only compile the compiler three times, avoiding this third compilation
    by copying artifacts from the previous one. Along the way a new entry in
    the Travis matrix was also added to ensure that our full bootstrap can
    succeed. This entry does not run tests, though, as it should not be
    necessary.
    
    To restore the old behavior of a full bootstrap (three compiles) you can
    either pass:
    
        ./configure --enable-full-bootstrap
    
    or if you're using config.toml:
    
        [build]
        full-bootstrap = true
    
    Overall this will hopefully be an easy 33% win in build times of the
    compiler. If we do 33% less work we should be 33% faster! This in turn
    should affect cycle times and such on Travis and AppVeyor positively as
    well as making it easier to work on the compiler itself.
    7046fea5