8.3.8 Completion server

To get the best speed for both compilation and completion, you can use the --wait command-line parameter to start a Haxe compilation server. You can also use -v to have the server print the log. Here's an example:

haxe -v --wait 6000

You can then connect to the Haxe server, send command-line parameters followed by a 0 byte and, then, read the response (either completion result or errors).

Use the --connect command-line parameter to have Haxe send its compilation commands to the server instead of executing them directly :

haxe --connect 6000 myproject.hxml

Please note that you can use the parameter --cwd at the first sent command line to change the Haxe server's current working directory. Usually, classpaths and other files are relative to your project.

How it works

The compilation server will cache the following things:

• parsed files the files will only get parsed again if they are modified or if there was a parse error
• haxelib calls the previous results of haxelib calls will be reused (only for completion : they are ignored when doing a compilation)
• typed modules compilation modules will be cached after a successful compilation and can be reused in later compilation/completions if none of their dependencies have been modified

You can get a precise reading of the times spent by the compiler and how using the compilation server affects them by adding --times to the command line.

Protocol

As the following Haxe/Neko example shows, you can simply connect on the server port and send all commands (one per line) ending with a 0 binary char. You can, then, read the results.

Macros and other commands can log events which are not errors. From the command line, we can see the difference between what is printed on stdout and what is print on stderr. This is not the case in socket mode. In order to differentiate between the two, log messages (not errors) are prefixed with a x01 character and all newline-characters in the message are replaced by the same x01 character.

Warnings and other messages can also be considered errors, but are not fatal ones. If a fatal error occurred, it will send a single x02 message-line.

Here's some code that will treat the connection to the server and handle the protocol details:

class Main {
  static function main() {
    var newline = "\n";
    var s = new sys.net.Socket();
    s.connect(new sys.net.Host("127.0.0.1"), 6000);
    s.write("--cwd /my/project" + newline);
    s.write("myproject.hxml" + newline);
    s.write("\000");

    var hasError = false;
    for (line in s.read().split(newline)) {
      switch (line.charCodeAt(0)) {
        case 0x01:
          Sys.print(line.substr(1).split("\x01").join(newline));
        case 0x02:
          hasError = true;
        default:
          Sys.stderr().writeString(line + newline);
      }
    }
    if (hasError)
      Sys.exit(1);
  }
}

Effect on macros

The compilation server can have some side effects on macro execution.

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