FASTBuild - Change Log

Notes

DB Version Changed : clean build will occur
Cache version has changed
Workers are forwards/backwards compatible, but new workers are required to see all performance gains.
Behavior Changes

Arg processing has been overhauled for correctness and consistency; fixes may invalidate previous work-arounds
Failed/aborted multi-target builds now behave as single target builds, stopping as soon as possible.
-nostoponerror can still be used to build as much before failing.
Cache compression defaults and algorithms have changed

Fixes

Caching

Clang-CL on Windows stores/retrieves pch.obj when needed (Thanks to poljak181)
LightCache finds dependencies correctly when response files are used

Args Processing

Escaped quotes are correctly handled in process arguments
Quotes are properly tokenized regardless of quote position
Args with quotes and spaces are correctly tokenized
[OSX][Linux] Args with quotes are handled correctly when spawning processes
-compdb correctly handles escaped quotes in arguments

Project Generation

VCXProject generation correctly escapes &, < and > in all properties
Fix typo in build-time errors regarding VSProjectExternal config problems

Fix typo in Error 1035 regarding exessive depth complexity
[Windows] Directories ignored when checking FileExists (consistent with OSX & Linux)
Ensure different dir listings on same folder respect exclude paths (v1.12 regression)

Improvements

Distributed Compilation

Distributed compilation return bandwidth reduced ~40% with new defaults
Improved message for "Failed to store fileId" errors in FBuildWorker

Caching

Cache storage space reduced by ~40% with new defaults
Cache hit/store bandwidth reduced by ~40% with new defaults

Other Performance

Optimize startup time by avoiding unnecessary work during DB loading
Optimize startup time after bff edits by avoiding unnecessary work during DB migration
Small optimization to bff parsing when handling aliases
Improve bff parsing performance slightly for Linker/DLL items

Build stop on failure/abort behavior for multiple targets matches one target builds
Build output now differentiates "Failure" from "Incomplete" for multiple targets

Notes

DB Version Changed : clean build will occur
RemoveDir will remove directories as well as files by default

Fixes

Fix slow job processing with extremely large amounts of jobs
Fix spurious "Failed to spawn" errors when a build is being aborted
Restore full stack size for threads that call cache plugins (regression in v1.11)
Fix memory leak when a corrupt cache item is retrieved
Various documentation fixes (Thanks to Harrison Ting)

Improvements

-distverbose emits worker version info for v1.12 workers onwards
RemoveDir removes dirs as well as files by default
RemoveDir directory berhavior can be controlled with .RemoveDirs and .RemoveRootDir
Small performance improvement to various internal hashing operations
VCXProject supports additional Android Game Development Extension options

Notes

DB Version Changed : clean build will occur

Fixes

[Linux] Robustify file copy if sendfile isn't supported (Thanks to Nick Krecklow)

Improvements

Reduce cost of queueing jobs during graph traversal
Improve LightCache performance considerably for many CPU core systems
Directory listings with excluded folders optimized significantly
All directory listings optimized slightly
Database loading and various lookup performance improved slightly
Improve database load time slightly
Error #1100 emits location of previous declaration
-dbfile arg can explicitly set dependency db file location (Thanks to Troels Gram)
[Linux] Improve detection of max args length using _SC_ARG_MAX (Thanks to Domain)
VXCProject exposes AndroidApkLocation for Android Game Development Extension

Notes

DB Version Changed : clean build will occur
Cache version changed : cache will be re-populated

New

[OSX] Apple Silicon is supported natively using Universal binaries

Fixes

Distributed Compilation

Prevent Worker over-requesting jobs when there are multiple Clients

[Linux][OSX] Fix file/folder permissions being exessively permissive (Thanks to Pete Lewis)
Chained ObjectLists correctly handle duplicate names in sub-directories (Thanks to Dandielo)
Fix crash when .CompilerOutputPath is missing but required on ObjectList/Library

Improvements

Distributed Compilation

Toolchain management performance improved slightly when toolchain changes
Remove some unecessary lock contention in FBuildWorker
FBuildWorker can be set to restart every 4 hours (-periodicrestart)
Eliminate various instances of lock contention in FBuildWorker

Cache performance improved slightly for check, store and retrieve operations
Performance of various build steps improved slightly
Database validation improved, reducing startup/shutdown time slightly
Fix documenation errors for some optional fields (Thanks to Harrison Ting)

Notes

DB Version Changed : clean build will occur

Fixes

Distributed Compilation

Distributed compilation will no longer distribute to itself (the host machine)

[Windows] Working dir canonicalization works in directories with special display names
Response files arg is correctly quoted for Clang compatibility (Thanks to Sebastien Alaiwan)
Directories ending in /.. or /. (no trailing slash) are handled correctly in various places (Thanks to dummyunit)
Re-instate optimization to avoid some processing when MSVC warnings as errors (/WX) is used
Concatenating empty arrays within structs is properly handled (Thanks to Curtis Maves)
Concatenating non-empty ArrayOfStructs no longer incorrectly changes type to Struct (Thanks to Curtis Maves)
Add missing .CompilerInputAllowNoFiles for Library() in basic documentation
-Werror for clang/gcc was not properly detected inhibiting a minor optimization (Thanks to poljak181)

Improvements

Distributed Compilation

[Windows] STATUS_CONTROL_C_EXIT (0xC000013A) is considered a retryable System Failure (Thanks to Sam Hocevar)

Add FASTBUILD_EXE_PATH built-in variable (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
Add .Environment option to Exec() (Thanks to ZeroErrors)
Improved compression perf in some scenarios (LZ4 1.9.4)
Expose recursion control for in VCXProject & XCodeProject via .CompilerInputPathsRecurse (Thanks to Troels Gram)
-report can output in json format as well as html (Thanks to EwanMoshi)

Notes

DB Version Changed : clean build will occur

Fixes

Distributed Compilation

Harden FBuildWorker against corrupt data from old clients
Prevent toolchain synchronization getting stuck if a worker disconnects before synchronizing the manifest

Improvements

Distributed Compilation

Clang/GCC gcov disables distributed compilation (results are not usable if built remotely)
[Windows] Consider remote error 0x4 (ERROR_TOO_MANY_OPEN_FILES) a system failure
Modify remote errors that are retried in -distverbose output to stop MSBuild considering them as failures

Caching

Clang/GCC gcov files (.gcno) are cached when used
[Windows] Working dir casing normalized to remove variances in cache key generation

Improve dependency graph traversal performance
Optimize dependency graph traversal by eliminating redundant checks
Improve database corruption detection to handle things like power loss
Improve node graph traversal by avoiding unnecessary cyclic dependency checks
RemoveDir can use .RemoveExcludeFiles to exclude specific files (Thanks to Domain)
[Windows] Working dir casing normalized avoiding portability issues with Clang

Notes

DB Version Changed : clean build will occur
Cache version has changed

Fixes

Distributed Compilation

Prevent Client/Server network stream desync that can occur during ToolChain synchronization

[Linux][OSX] Fix compiler output being truncated in some situations
Fix unsafe mutli-threaded access when using -profile
Messages are correctly escaped in -monitor log (regression in v1.06)
Prevent leaking an environment variable string (Thanks to Lambert Clara)

Improvements

Distributed Compilation

Adds a -distcompressionlevel flag (Thanks to Mark De Ruyter)

Settings() DisableDBMigration option has been removed. This feature has been stable for many versions
-fixuperrorpaths converts WSL paths to Windows paths

Notes

DB Version Changed : clean build will occur
-nounity is no longer experimental

Fixes

Distributed Compilation

Fix a potential deadlock due to unnecessary lock contention
Prevent unnecessary network disconnections when under heavy network load
-profile correctly displays items that fail remotely
Fix rare failure with no error if remote race won as local job was being finalized
Fix occasional memory leak when a remote race was lost
Fix remote system failure causing build failure with no error when being raced
-monitor info no longer missing for remote jobs that lose a race
-distverbose info no longer missing for remote jobs that lose a race
stats correctly account for remote failures
Distributed compilation no longer fails remotely with a "system error" when MSVC /sourceDependencies is used
/sourceDependencies are no longer overwritten when using -cache or -dist (Thanks to Samuel Lorétan)

Caching

LightCache is auto-disabled if MSVC /sourceDependencies is used (falls back to normal cache)

BFF Parsing:

Fix crash on wrong literal type in boolean evaluator (Thanks to Dummyunit)
Avoid spurious error when lhs of an If() expression doesn't exist

Project Generation

XCode project generation handles special characters in filenames
Solution, VCXProj & XCodeProj record stamps, avoiding downstream rebuilds

[Linux] Fix file copies on linux for files > 0x7FFF000 bytes (sendfile limit) (Thanks to Domain)
Build time cyclic dependencies are detected. An error is reported instead of the build never completing
-nounity toggle works correctly when toggled with no other changes
Space in command line targets are handled when using -wrapper (Thanks to Léo Carnaut-Delord)

Improvements

Distributed Compilation

Distributed compilation network bandwidth reduced considerably (20-40%)
-distverbose provides additional information for remote jobs race and error state
When -dist and -cache are used together, compression is performed remotely
-profile provides additional information for remote jobs race and error state
-profile contains basic network connectivity information
Report contains remote CPU time summary (Thanks to Evgeny)

Project Generation

Intellisense options are populated for disabled warnings
VCXProject BuildCommand etc set correctly when Keyword = 'Linux' (for WSL)

-profile entries are more easily distinguishable for failed items
-profile output memory stats descriptions improved
FASTBuild will create output folder for MSVC /sourceDependencies if it doesn't exist
[Windows] Reduce permissions used to set file last write times
-nounity avoids unnecessary rebuilds when toggled back to off
Windows SDK is auto-detected when compiling FASTBuild (Thanks to Matt Barth)

Notes

DB Version Changed : clean build will occur
Changed how command lines are processed internally to greatly reduce the need for distributed protocol bumps in future versions

Fixes

-profile emits correctly escaped JSON
Clang explicit language args (-x) are updated for FASTBuild's second compilation pass (Thanks to dummyunit)
Various args are correctly handled (for example removing -I with clang after preprocessing) when quoted with "
LightCache works correctly when MSVC /FI option is used
Compilation database includes correct executable path in json
Fix several problems with function headers for aliases using variables. e.g. Copy( .Var ) or Copy( ."$Var$" )
-MD and -MF args are stripped from second pass, avoiding problems they can cause (Thanks to Nick Edwards)
CLR use is detected when using /clr with args (such as /clr:netcore)

Improvements

Caching

Add LightCache support for MSVC /external:I paths (Thanks to Javier Blazquez)

BFF Parsing:

If() supports complex compound expressions and literals (Thanks to Logan Zhou)
BFF parsing speed greatly improved for projects with many executable or dll configurations

Project Generation

Visual Studio project generation automatically populates FI (NMakeForcedIncludes) properties
Add Intellisense support for MSVC /external:I paths (Thanks to Javier Blazquez)

Notes

DB Version Changed : clean build will occur
Distributed compilation protocol has changed: please update workers

New

-profile option emits fbuild_profile.json in Chrome tracing format, which can be used to visualize the build
Dependencies can be exported in DOT format using -dot and -dotfull

Fixes

OSX binaries explicitly target OSX 10.7 (the minimum supported version)
Unity fixup is applied when using Clang-cl with static analysis so errors are correctly reported
Compilation with Clang doesn't fail when output is empty (can occur with Clang-cl with empty files)
SourceMapping_Experimental is applied correcly when using Clang-cl
Clang-cl distributed compilation is auto disabled when using SourceMapping_Experimental (remapping is not currently distributed)
Warnings are printed for remotely built objects when using Clang-cl even if "warning as errors" is off
-fixuperrorpaths is correctly applied to Clang warnings using (x,y) style line numbering
[OSX][Linux] -fixuperrorpaths with VBCC doesn't change slash direction on Linux/OSX
Fix typo in 'Could not resolve macro' LightCache messages
Executable and DLL '%1[1]' is now correctly expanded even if '%1[0]' is not used
Output messages no longer missing when using LightCache with -cachewrite and no distribution

Improvements

Distributed Compilation:

Distributed compilation scheduling latency reduced by upto 100ms in certain scenarios
Distributed compilation performance improved slightly due to LZ4 compressor update (1.9.3)
Network Protocol bandwidth usage reduced slightly
FBuildWorker idle CPU usage reduced, particularly for systems with many cpu cores
FBuildWorker shuts down more quickly due to improved thread management
Jobs are scheduled in a more efficient order when using distributed compilation (both locally and remotely)
[Windows] Avoid per-CPU core stall updating FBuildWorker UI, which could also delay exiting (up to 100ms per core)

Cache:

Cache performance improved slightly due to LZ4 compressor update (1.9.3)
LightCache use is no longer inhibited by unused includes using macros: #include SOME_MACRO

Compilation ordering improved by remove unnecesary dependencies from ObjectList and Library
[Windows] Reduce CPU overhead of FBuild slightly, particularly with many CPU cores
When using Clang with static analysis, results are written to output file if no output is written by Clang itself
Dependency database memory usage reduced slightly
FastCancel is enabled by default and can be disabled with -nofastcancel
Remove deprecated -nooutputbuffering (option hasn't done anything for a long time)
Build database read/write optimized slightly

Notes

DB Version Changed : clean build will occur

New

Support integration of FASTBuild, Windows Subsystem for Linux and Visual Studio
-wsl option can forward to Windows Subsystem for Linux in Visual Studio
FASTBuild can be built as a native exe for Apple ARM (Thanks to Javier Blazquez)
ListDependencies() function can output discovered dependencies (Thanks to poppolopoppo)

Fixes

BFF Parsing:

$ Subsititutions in string literal args to User Functions were not handled in the correct scope
Escaped characters in string literal args to User Functions were not escaped correctly
#if directives were not correctly handled when used inside list declarations (and possibly other cases)

-Bstatic and -Bdynamic are respected when parsing linker command line (Thanks to dummyunit)
-l option checks for dynamic libs first to match GNU ld behavior (Thanks to dummyunit)
Visual Studio solution header for VS2019 so version selector works correctly
Add missing \n to ListDependenciesNode output (Thanks to mhoulier)
Fix features documentation typo (Thanks to Aleksey Kladov)
Respect minimum stack size constraint on OSX and Linux (Thanks to Nicolas)
Missing errors for preprocessors that write to stdout on failure

Improvements

Distributed Compilation:

Workers write their IP directly to brokerage to improve discoverability (Thanks to Joe Kirchoff)
Workers can be explicity listed with a FASTBUILD_WORKERS env var (Thanks to eclazi)

Project Generation:

Intellisense/CodeSense detects more path types (/imsvsc, -isystem and others) (Thanks to dummyunit)

Add explicit support for Clang on windows in clang-cl mode (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
Detect libraries provided directly on command line via -l:filename (Thanks to dummyunit)
MSVC linker failure LNK1201 is automatically retried to work around VS2019 bug
Allow FASTBuild to be compiled for ARM on Linux (Thanks to Nicolas)
Add .Libraries2 to Executable and DLL which can be accessed with %1[1]

Notes

DB Version Changed : clean build will occur

Fixes

BFF Parsing:

ForEach correctly handles comma separator in parallel loops

[Windows] Prevent deadlock in FBuildWorker on shutdown when it's sent a WM_QUIT by another application
Fix documentation errors for VCXProject and XCodeProject
Exec node times are emitted to the -monitor log (Thanks to Joe Kirchoff)
CSAssembly() handles forward and backslashes correctly on all platforms in .CompilerInputExcludePattern
Exec() handles forward and backslashes correctly on all platforms in .ExecInputExcludePattern
ObjectList() handles forward and backslashes correctly on all platforms in .CompilerInputExcludePattern
Test() handles forward and backslashes correctly on all platforms in .TestInputExcludePattern
[Linux] Various "CanUseResponseFile" options are respected on Linux
Fix a failure path writing response files that was not stopping compilation correctly

Improvements

Caching:

Increase thread stack size to avoid unexpected problems with cache plugins
Cache plugin can be initialized via InitEx which provides details of operating mode (read/write/verbose)
Settings exposes .CachePluginDLLConfig to all passing of custom config to cache plugins
[Windows] Cache plugin DLL function names no longer need to be mangled

BFF Parsing:

#if operator supports compound expressions using && and || (Thanks to ggnkua)

AllowResponseFile can be set on Compiler (Thanks to Axel Wefers)
LibrarianAllowResponseFile can be set on Library (Thanks to Axel Wefers)
LinkerAllowResponseFile can be set on DLL or Executable (Thanks to Axel Wefers)
ObjectLists can be chained using .CompilerInputObjectLists
VCXProject and XCodeProject include .editorconfig files by default
Add troubleshooting documentation for the Cache (Thanks to Layla Mah)
Add .SourceMapping_Experimental to Compiler() to control -fdebug-source-map (Thanks to Jaview Blazquez)
Compiler() response file use can be forced with .ForceResponseFile
Library() response file use can be forced with .LibrarianForceResponseFile
Executable()/DLL() response file use can be forced with .LinkerForceResponseFile
[Linux] Command line limits (128 KiB) are enforced on Linux to make problems more obvious

Notes

DB Version Changed : clean build will occur
Network protocol version has changed. Please update FBuildWorkers

Fixes

Distributed Compilation:

[Windows] Terminated remote jobs are once again system failues (Regression in v1.0)

BFF Parsing:

Environment variables imported with #import no longer have carets (^) swallowed
Environment variables containing $ imported with #import no longer cause parsing errors

[Windows] Correctly handle long paths on Windows (if enabled at OS level)
Many documentation typos fixed (Thanks to Fedya Zentsev)

Improvements

Distributed Compilation:

[OSX][Linux] Remote Clang and GCC disk space erorrs are System Failures and are re-scheduled

BFF Parsing:

BFF parsing speed improved significantly (as much as 2x)

Unity node supports relative paths with UseRelativePaths_Experimental
Minor improvements to error documentation
CSharp compiler is auto detected, removing need to set "custom" .CompilerFamily

Notes

BFF directives (#if/#include etc) are now processed in a preprocessor pass, consistent with C/C++. This fix means it is no longer possible to use variables inside include paths.
Unity order was potentially inconsistent between platforms, OSs, filesystems and locales. A fix for this may result in a change of include order in Unity files.
DB Version Changed : clean build will occur
Cache version has changed

New

BFF syntax supports users defined functions
TextFile allows the generation of text files (Thanks to mkujawa)
file_exists directive can be used with #if to detect the presence of files
-why command line option details the trigger for each thing that builds

Fixes

Distributed Compilation:

FBuildWorker CPU drop down scrolls when there are many CPUs
[Windows] Fix FBuildWorker menu item not hiding correctly (Thanks to deter2030)
[OSX][Linux] Periodically touch synchronized toolchains to prevent deletion from tmp dir

Project Generation:

XCodeProjectGenerator properly quotes strings containing '+' (Thanks to Javier Blazquez)
Add missing documentation for several XCode project generation debugging settings

Caching:

-cacheinfo and -cachetrim work correctly on case-sensitive filesystems (Thanks to dummyunit)
Crash in LightCache when #includes via macros are encountered (Thanks to Francisco Facioni & Brian Burgin)
Fix LightCache missing dependency information when using macros (Thanks to Francisco Facioni)
If LightCache cannot handle a macro-based include, it will fall back to normal caching correctly

Order of files in Unity is consistent between OSs, file systems and locales
Rebuilds correctly trigger if dependent files are deleted even if no other changes occur
Rebuilds correctly trigger when mod times change to the past
Rebuilds occur correctly if time is adjusted during or shortly after a build (daylight savings, clock drift, timezone change etc)
Rebuilds occur correctly if files are modified externally during a build
CopyDir and RemoveDir report error when target name is not specified (Thanks to dummyunit)
-fixuperrorpaths no longer mangles "function" level errors when using VBCC
MSVC PrecompiledHeader works correctly when .obj filename is different from .pch file (Thanks to Francisco Facioni)
[Linux][OSX] Fix directory being treated as a file in some situations
Executable/DLL .LinkerAssemblyResources accepts ObjectLists as input (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
Prevent malformed errors with -fixuperrorpaths and VBCC
-verbose info for directory lists is contiguous
Fix Green Hills linker detection when exe is specified without .exe extension (Thanks to Francisco Facioni)
-showtargets no longer returns error code -7 when -wrapper is used

Improvements

Distributed Compilation:

[Windows] FBuildWorker has a -debug option to match FBuild to assist debugging (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
[Windows] FBuildWorker checks available mem before taking jobs (control with -minfreememory) (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
FBuildWorker brokerage file contains configuration info (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
FBuildWorker CPU idle detection level can be set in the UI (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
FASTBUILD_BROKERAGE_PATH can contain multiple ; delimited paths (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
Local race of distributed jobs can be disable with -nolocalrace debug option (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
Brokers periodically (~12hrs) delete stale tokens (>24hrs old) left by other workers (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
Improved -help/usage option for FBuild and FBuildWorker
Workers periodically update brokerage modification time to allow pruning (Thanks to Brian Burgin)
[Windows] Decompression speed on remote workers improved by ~10%

Project Generation:

iOS deployment target can be set with XCodeIphoneOSDeploymentTarget option
VSProjectExternal allows existing project use in FASTBuild generated VS Solutions (Thanks to Lucian Muresan)
Clang static analysis is applied consistently to files in Unity
Visual Studio Solution() generation supports "Solution Items" (Thanks to Lucian Muresan)

Caching:

Stronger compression can be enabled for cache artifacts via the command line (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
-cachecompressionlevel controls level of compression for cache artifacts
LightCache emits reason for not being used when -cacheverbose is active

BFF Parsing:

BFF parsing consistently handles comments and whitespace everywhere
BFF parsing speed improved significantly for many scenarios
BFF includes are handled during preprocessing (consistent with C/C++)
Parsing errors relating to invalid characters avoid printing garbage
BFF parsing speed improved slightly by reducing memory allocations and string copying

ExecAlwaysShowOutput option allows Exec to alway print output (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
Add .Environment option to TestNode (Thanks to Brian Burgin)
--continueafterdbmove allows a clean build after warning of DB move (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
Warning when retrieving corrupt data from the cache constains cache key
Unknown variables in dynamic variable names emit error 1009 instead of 1026
Multiple ObjectLists building the same obj with different settings are now detected
"conflicting files found" error improved to include "owner" ObjectList info
Clang/GCC #line directives are ignored unless they result from the preprocessor including a file (Thanks to crondog)
Corrupt DB does not prevent builds. Corrupt db is renamed and a warning is emitted (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
Updated bash completion script (Thanks to dummyunit)
-showcmdoutput cmdline option shows the full output of all external processes
Librarian() exposed .LibrarianType to allow explicit control of type (Thanks to Francisco Facioni)
Unity can isolate files listed in an file specified by .UnityInputIsolateListFile (Thanks to poppolopoppo)
PrecompiledHeaders can be re-used between multiple ObjectLists
Dependency graph traversal optimized by parallelizing file timestamp retrieval
Unity evaluation is avoided when no inputs have changed
[Windows] Directly listing cost reduced by ~30%

Notes

DB Version Changed : clean build will occur
Distributed compilation protocol version changed : please update workers
Cache version has changed

New

When bff changes, only affected targets are rebuilt
[OSX] FBuildWorker UI implemented for OSX

Fixes

Distributed Compilation:

[Linux][OSX] Fix occasional compilation failure when a remote host wins a distributed race (Thanks to dummyunit)
ObjectiveC/C++ distribution is automatically disabled (can't be robustly distributed)
Distributed compilation automatically disabled for incompatible /analyze options with MSVC compiler
[OSX][Linux] FBuildWorker restarts when it detects it has been modified
[OSX][Linux] Avoid unnecessary thread creation on Linux and OSX for failed network connections (Thanks to dummyunit)
Warnings no longer swallowed when generated remotely if /WX not set (Thanks to Leonid Mashinskiy)

Project Generation:

Fix slow Visual Studio project generation for projects with over 1024 files
Files in folders in the XCode tree view are sorted alphabetically
XCode "-doc" projects are hidden by default
Intellisense/CodeSense information is correctly populated if project references a Copy()

Caching:

Expermental LightCache feature detects unsupported #import directives (Thanks to dummyunit)
Cache write only + dist no longer uses an incorrect key for storing
Caching with /analyze no longer uses preprocessed output so SAL-reliant errors work correctly

BFF Parsing:

Fix %s 'is not an ObjectNode (type: File)' error when migrating DB after bff edit
Error 1034 no longer malformed for certain operators (was printing ??? in some cases) (Thanks to dummyunit)
Concatenating empty arrays of a different type could produce incorrect results (Thanks to dummyunit)

Emit error when database (.fdb) cannot be loaded correctly due to corruption (was silently failing)
[Linux] Correct fbuild.linux.fdb is used for database file as intended (Thanks to dummyunit)
Add missing line feeds to some error messages (Thansk to dummyunit)
Emit error instead of hanging when fbuild.exe fails to spawn in wrapper mode (Thanks to dummyunit)
Clang and GCC warnings are shown when -Werror is not set, just like MSVC without /WX
GCC preprocessed extension fixed so language is correct regardless of compiler exe name or -x options (Thanks to dummyunit)
Missing properties added to integration files (usertype.dat and notepad++markup.xml)
Relative path generation was not case sensitive on Windows and OSX (Thanks to ohoughton)

Improvements

Distributed Compilation:

Add proportional FBuildWorker mode - scale to consume available idle CPU (Thanks to Tomáš Nezval)
FBuildWorker stops accepting work more quickly when machine leaves idle state (Thanks to Tomáš Nezval)
C1060 (out of heap mem) only considered a system failure when C1076 & C3859 not present (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
Defer loading of Compiler() files until needed, saving some time for distributed builds
Compiler() avoids re-hashing files after DB migration
Reduce process shutdown time for distributed builds when closing connections
[OSX] FBuildWorker for OSX supports simple Idle Detection

Project Generation:

Optimize Visual Studio project generation 10%
VCXProject automatically populates the LocalDebuggerCommand if a .Target is specified for a config
Intellisense/Codesense includes -isystem -isystem-after and -iquote include paths
VCXProj exposes .Keyword, .ApplicationType, .ApplicationTypeRevision, .PackagePath and .AdditionalSymbolPath per-config
VCXProject exposes .ProjectProjectImports to allow importing of custom .targets files
VCXProject imports Android .targets if available to better support debugging on Android
XCode projects are generated to more closely match manually created projects
XCode projects can set .XCodeBaseSDK (macosx, iphoneos etc) in .ProjectConfigs
XCode projects can set .CommandLineArguments and .CommandLineArgumentsDisabled
XCode projects have "Document Versioning" disabled by default (can enable with .XCodeDocumentVersioning)
XCode projects can set .XCodeDebugWorkingDir in .ProjectConfigs
XCode projects set various options to avoid warnings in later XCode versions

Caching:

-cacheverbose provides details about compression timing (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
-cacheverbose shows more detailed info for cache stores, to match cache hits
LightCache can handle includes from macros
Significant improvement to LightCache performance (Thanks to Ben Craig)

BFF Parsing:

Optimize BFFParser parsing when creating structs (speedups for 20% or more are not uncommon)
BFFParsing speed improved ~2.5%
Use StackArray to improve BFF parsing performance ~2.5%

Library, ObjectList, Alias and Unity nodes can be hidden from -showtargets (Thanks to Philipp Mirzayants)
-report includes cache timing information (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
Directory lists in the -summary shown in a more human readable format (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
Failed builds terminate up to 0.5s faster
UnityInputIsolatedFiles allows files to be automatically exluded from Unity, but still compiled (Thanks to Martin Donlon)
Output for failed tasks no longer deleted - failed output can be useful for triage
[OSX] nsec filetimes supported on OS X 10.13 and higher with APFS
[Linux] Reduce process overhead (particularly for short-lived ones)
[Linux] Reduce per-process buffer size usage to scale better on multi-core systems

Notes

DB Version Changed : clean build will occur
Distributed compilation protocol version changed : please update workers

New

.UseLightCache_Experimental mode on Compiler() can be used for massively accelerated caching
-compdb option can create a JSON Compilation Database (Thanks to dummyunit)

Fixes

Distributed Compilation:

Fix race condition resulting in crash when a local race is won (Thanks to dummyunit, Sam Hocevar & Lambert Clara)
Prevent rare crash during startup when using distributed compilation

BFF Parsing:

Variable self-assignment is handled correctly during bff parsing (Thanks to dummyunit)
Fix inconsistent parsing of bff function headers without args (Thanks to dummyunit)

[OSX][Linux] FASTBUILD_CACHE_PATH env var is respected on OSX and Linux (Thanks to Damian Szuberski)
GCC is corrently detected for when version specific exe is referenced (Thanks to Damian Szuberski)
Strip -isysroot when compiling preprocessed output; should only be used during preprocessing (Thanks to Nick Edwards)
Paths terminated with .. are correctly canonicalized (Thanks to Yaroslav Kovtun)
DLL() detects dll when a library is configured via -Wl,--oformat=prx (Thanks to jfr2)
Precompiled headers are migrated when using AllowDBMigration_Experimental (Thanks to Yaroslav Kovtun)
MSVC precompiled header users are retrievable from cache after DB migration using AllowDBMigration_Experimental
[Windows] UNC paths are respected in some places they were not (Thanks to Brian Burgin)
MSVC .pchast is correctly cached when folder name contains a period (Thanks to Brian Burgin)
MSVC .pchast is correctly cached when filename contains a period

Improvements

Distributed Compilation:

FBuildWorker responds to quite notifications (Thanks to Brian Burgin)
Compiler files sent for distributed compilation are compressed (Thanks to Brian Burgin)
-forceremote no longer modifies caching options
Remote MSVC out of heap space is automatically retried
Remote MSVC failing to write compiler tmp file is automatically retried
Remove worker timeout mechanism which could cause unnecessary disconnections under heavy network load
Workers will reject connections from mismatched platforms

BFF Parsing:

Non-bff parsing error formats standardized (Thanks to Brian Burgin)

Project Generation:

XCode schemes appear alphabetically
XCode project folders appear alphabetically
XCode "doc" schemes are hidden by default

[Linux][OSX] Significantly improve compile times by fixing process output capture (Thanks to Yaroslav Kovtun)
Improve resilience against corrupt files in the network cache
Exec() can be made to run every time with new .ExecAlways property
Test will print test output if a test times out to assist triage (Thanks to dummyunit)
.i extension is used for preprocessed files when using gcc (Thanks to Damian Szuberski)
Colored output from Clang and GCC is supported (Thanks to dummyunit)
.Environment can be set per Compiler, Library, Executable and DLL (Thanks to Brian Burgin)
.CompilerOutputKeepBaseExtension can be set on ObjectList if extension is needed to uniquify (Thanks to Yaroslav Kovtun)
The .fdb is uniquified per-platform to allow filesystem shared between operating systems/VMs
Improve compression speed slightly (Upgrade to LZ4)

Notes

DB Version Changed : clean build will occur

New

[Experimental] .AllowDBMigration_Experimental (Settings) allows retention of build state across BFF changes
[OSX][Linux] Settings() .CachePathMountPoint option allows enforcing of cache mount validity
_CURRENT_BFF_DIR_ is defined containing path to the bff being parsed
Error() function allows user errors to be emitted during BFF parsing (Error 1999)

Fixes

Distributed Compilation:

Fix occasional build failure with error 0x1 when a distributed race is won
[OSX][Linux] Sockets are not inheritable by child processes
[OSX] Sockets don't trigger spurious SIG_PIPE errors
[OSX] Port reuse updated for OS X behavior change (SO_REUSEADDR vs SO_REUSEPORT)
Nagle's algorithm is disabled for return connection from server->client
Fix -distverbose stack overflow when remote worker is deny listed (and possibly in other situations)
Fix file handle leak on IO error transferring compiler files (Thanks to dummyunit)
Remote system failure info is shown when -distverbose is used

BFF Parsing:

If() error correctly reports type when lhs is unsupported for operator "in"
If() reports an error if extraneous text is found after a valid expression

Project Generation:

VCXProject files correctly pathed for project in sub-directory of BasePath
VCXProject generation correctly handles files and folders with common sub-strings (Thanks to Jeremy Moore)
Solution() errors in .Projects or .Dependencies print the correct property name in the error
Solution() paths to .vcxproject are relative even when .vcxproject is not in a sub-directory (Thanks to Chris Helvig)

Prevent duplicate symbols in libraries when using ar.exe in some situations
Emit error when failing to delete .exe/.dll/.pdb/.ilk
Folders are created for .asm and .pdb files when paths contain inconsistent slashes
Add missing -monitor option to cmd line usage info
Add missing -monitor and -progress option documentation
[OSX][Linux] .lock files are no longer inherited by child processes, preventing "FASTBuild is already running" messages
Fix incremental link when NOREF, NOICF or NOLBR options are used on cmd line (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
[Windows] Prevent deadlock if Ctrl+C is used to terminate certain tools like Clang (Thanks to Brian Burgin)
Settings() .CachePath takes precedence over environment variable as intended
[OSX][Linux] Child processes no longer inherit file handles, avoiding issues like .lock files being held incorrectly
Linker removes bad trailing slashes from LIBPATH that would escape quotes
-monitor works if build is started before monitor application has ever been run (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
[Linux][OSX] -cacheinfo age is correctly calculated (Thanks to Yaroslav Kovtun)
Fixed typo in options documentation for -report (Thanks to Brian Burgin)

Improvements

Distributed Compilation:

Remote failure details are shown when -distverbose is used
Brokerage path shown as part of "Workers Found" message (Thanks to Lambert Clara)

BFF Parsing:

If() supports operator >, <, >= and <=
If() supports integers in comparisson syntax
Add _FASTBUILD_VERSION_ and _FASTBUILD_VERSION_STRING_ built-in variables
If() Documentation lists all currently supported syntax and operators
Small speedup to bff parsing when parsing Linker (Executable/DLL) nodes (Thanks to dummyunit)
Small optimization to BFF parsing, avoiding memory allocations appending strings to arrays (Thanks to dummyunit)

Project Generation:

Solution() generates solutions with paths to projects using Windows style slashes on Linux and OSX
Solution() "deploy" project scan be set via SolutionDeployProjects
Solution() "build" and "deploy" projects can be set per SolutionConfiguration
Intellisense AdditionalOptions are auto-populated for /std: option

Improve IO performance on local disk and SMB shares
Work around Windows file system permission problems when creating response files
FASTBuild detects MSVC linker error LNK1136 (pdb corruption) and retries linking

Notes

DB Version Changed : clean build will occur
FBuildWorker version has changed - ensure all workers are updated
Visual Studio Project generation uses new GUID scheme
FBuildWorker no longer shows balloon tip when being minimized

New

Add _WORKING_DIR_ built-in variable
If() function allows basic branching logic in bff config (Thanks to clevijoki)
[Experimental] Add "-nounity" option: build individually all files that would normally be in Unity

Fixes

Distributed Compilation:

Local fbuild.exe was deleting the worker token on build completion (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
Fix crash in distributed compilation caused by race condition (Thanks to dummyunit)
Processes terminated on a remote worker don't cause the build to fail with error 0x1
Errors from remote workers are emitted to the -monitor log (Thanks to hillin)
[Windows] Avoid file creation error 32 when a remote worker wins a race (Thanks to Alexandre Ganea)
FBuildWorker retries restarting for 10s when updated, so occasional locks don't preventing re-spawning
FBuildWorker tooltip restored (Thanks to Lambert Clara)

BFF Parsing:

Fix inifinte loop when an unterminated string is not handled correctly (Thanks to dummyunit)
Attempting to modify frozen variables in nested ForEach loops reports an error (Thanks to dummyunit)
Cyclic dependencies result in new error 1043 during parsing instead of crashing during shutdown
Fix crash when struct is replaced by its member in Using() (Thanks to dummyunit)
Fix closing brace in string incorrectly terminating scope in some rare cases (Thanks to dummyunit)

Project Generation:

Visual Studio Project GUID generation allows multiple projects with the same name (Thanks to James Leitch)
VSSolution errors relating to missing projects report correct property in errors
Avoid generating invalid Visual Studio projects when duplicate files are specified
Fix incorrect ToolsVersion (4.0 -> 15.0) in .vcxproj file (Thanks to Layla Mah)
VCXProject and XCodeProjects missing targets for some configs if one target was empty

Fix MS linker error when command line length is exactly 32767 (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
Fix typo in Executable error when ExecExecutable is missing (Thanks to dummyunit)
/analyze- is no longer incorrectly detected as enabling static analysis (Thanks to dummyunit)
CopyDir SourceExcludePaths paths are correctly applied (Thanks to James Leitch)
[OSX] Ctrl+C supported on OSX (build progress not lost when using Ctrl+C)
LIB variable from Settings() is used when finding libs (Thanks to Francisco Facioni)
[OSX][Linux] Fix thread handle leaks (Thanks to dummyunit)
Add missing keywords to VisualStudio and Notepad++ syntax highlighting (Thanks to Lucian Muresan)
Exec() correctly depends on dynamically discovered files (Thanks to James Leitch)
[Windows] Avoid temp file creation failures (anti-virus or async termination) (Thanks to Alexandre Ganea)
CopyDir reports error when target already exists (regression in v0.95) (Thanks to dummyunit)
RemoveDir reports error when target already exists (regression in v0.95) (Thanks to dummyunit)
Executable/DLL respect gcc/clang style cmd line dependencies (Thanks to Francisco Facioni)
Correctly handle nested aliases in .Compiler for ObjectList/Library
Fix "buidl" typo in -help text

Improvements

Distributed Compilation:

FBuildWorker no longer steals focus briefly on startup (Thanks to v1ne)
FBuildWorker no longer adds Windows 10 notification on startup (Thanks to v1ne)
FBuildWorker no longer steals focus when launched (or restarted) unminimized
-distverbose provides information about attempted and failed connections

Project Generation:

.SolutionBuildProject doesn't need to be specified redundantly in .SolutionProjects
VSSolution() .SolutionBuildProject supports multiple projects for increased flexibility

Upgrade LZ4 compression to v1.8.2 for improved cache and distribution performance
Compiler() can reference executables compiled by FASTBuild (Thanks to gkoreman)
Orbis-wave-psslc is auto-detected as a supported compiler (Thanks to gkoreman)
BFF parsing speed improved ~5%
Allow UnityInputExcludedFiles to handle partial paths (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
Exec() supports InputPath, InputPattern etc to dynamically discover files
[Linux] Reduce glibc dependencies to version 2.6 (Thanks to dummyunit)
Test() supports TestInput* options for additional dependency specification (Thanks to James Leitch)
Compiler detection works for Android when using .cmd wrappers (Thanks to Pavel Bibergal)
Progress output is automatically disabled when redirecting output (Thanks to dummyunit)
Better handling of symlinks in file operations; specifically when copying files (Thanks to James Leitch)
Add .CompilerInputAllowNoFiles to ObjectList/Library (Don't fail if no files are found)
Remove redundant "x64" from various places (help, ui) now that only x64 is supported
Report (-report) specifies host OS (Windows, OSX, Linux) rather than x64

Notes

DB Version Changed : clean build will occur
Cache version changed : previous cache entries will be ignored
Behaviour Changed: Sub struct concatenation order has been fixed (see fixes)
Pre-built executables for 32-bit Windows version will no longer be released

New

The VBCC compiler is now supported
-cacheinfo option dumps information about the cache
-cachetrim option trims the cache to the desired size
Support WindRiver compiler (dcc.exe) (treat as gcc) (Thanks to Mohamed El-Shahawi)
Add -cacheverbose command line option

Fixes

Distributed Compilation:

Prevent rare shutdown crash or deadlock when using distributed compilation
[Windows] Fix handle leak in FBuildWorker
FBuildWorker no longer exits if exe is deleted prior to replacement

BFF Parsing:

Concatenation of members in first level of sub-structs was reversed
Internal string copies avoid some potentially unsafe operations (Thanks to dummyunit)
Fix crash when accessing variable from parent scope that doesn't exist (Thanks to dummyunit)
Fix crash when mismatched types are provided in an Array declaration (Thanks to dummyunit)
Empty strings in Arrays report 'Empty string not allowed' instead of being silently accepted
Empty strings sepcified for files report 'Empty string not allowed' insead of 'Path not allowed'
Empty arrays being set for required properties are no longer silently accepted
Strings with embedded nuls not being copied properly during a grow operation (Thanks to dummyunit)
Mismatched types in Struct concatenation reports error #1034 instead of crashing

Project Generation:

Generated Visual Studio projects are compatible with Visual Studio Selector (Thanks to slonopotamus)
[OSX][Linux] .vcxproj Intellisense includes are generated with Windows-style slashes
Intellisense and CodeSense options are discovered when using spaces (e.g. "-D WIN32")
[Windows] .xcodeproj CodeSense include paths are generated with OSX-style slashes

Cache:

[OSX][Linux] Error message when failing to load cache plugin dll is correctly output (Thanks to dummyunit)
Cache entries not being unique when only filename changes
Cache stores additional files required by /analyze flag with msvc compiler

Prevent source files being deleted due to a rare race condition using experimental -fastcancel (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
[Linux] Fix FileCopy when dest file is read-only
Prevent precompiled headers using deoptimzation settings (Thanks to Jean-Sebastien Pelletier)
[Linux] Fix unsafe readlink retrieving executable path for fbuild (Thanks to dummyunit)
[Linux] Performance of hashing & compression was 5-10x slower due to incorrect optimizations (Thanks to dummyunit)
[OSX] [Linux] Handle DT_UNKNOWN correctly when walking directories on some file systems (Thanks to fuzzac)
[Windows] Clang/GCC remote failures no longer incorrectly report as System Failures (Thanks to Arturmazurek)
DLL() and Exectuable() have a proper dependency on the linker executable
[Linux] Tests which crash are correctly reported as failed (Thanks to dummyunit)
Failure to create temp files when compiling objects reports correct error (Thanks to dummyunit)
Work around VS2013/15 bug resulting in missing dependencies when an old .pch is on disk (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
Fix include detection when Clang is used as cl.exe (Thanks to Poppolopoppo)
Prevent crash breaking via Ctrl+C when -wrapper mode is used (-vs, -ide etc)
-config paths with spaces are correctly handled when using -vs or -ide (Thanks to liamkf)

Improvements

Distributed Compilation:

Remote compilation can win a race, improving compile times
Greatly reduce memory usage of FBuildWorker
FBuildWorker idle CPU usage reduced (check every 500ms instead of 100ms)
Expose local .DistributableJobMemoryLimitMiB in Settings
Increase distributable job memory limit to 2GiB for 64bit builds
Increase FBuildWorker idle detection threshold to 20%
Increase connection timeout which was too aggressive (0.5s -> 2.0s)
[Linux] FBuildWorker idle detection implemented

Project Generation:

VCXProj Intellisense info can be derived automatically in more situations
.ProjectAllowedFileExtensions includes *.asm and *.s by default

Copy with multiple .Source and non-dir .Dest generates an explicit error (#1400)
Avoid Copy() error setting timestamps for copy if dst file is locked by another application
Remove CopyNode serializing SourceBasePath property to DB unnecessarily
Error 1009 'Unknown variable.' includes variable name in case it's not obvious from the context
.CompilerFamily can be explicitly set on Compiler() to override auto-detection (Thanks to Layla Mah)
Unity pragmas are commented out for files isolated from unity
DLL() and Executable() support .PreBuildDependencies
Test() supports .PreBuildDependencies
Bash completion script updates for latest options (Thanks to dummyunit)

Notes

DB Version Changed : clean build will occur

New

-quiet option can be used to supress build output (Thanks to Nik Reiman)
-showdeps displays dependencies, useful for debugging build configs (Thanks to Layla Mah)
FBuildWorker -console cmd line arg enables UI-less "console" mode
-nosummaryonerror option supresses -summary if the build fails (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
Added -forceremote option for troubleshooting (Thanks to Lambert Clara)

Fixes

CSAssembly pattern defaults to *.cs again (regression introduced in v0.93)
Fix compatibility with Recode (include paths removed sometimes) (regression introduced in v0.93)
Return code in wrapper mode is now non-zero when child process crashes (Thanks to Sam Hocevar)
Restore custom Preprocessor functionality (regression in v0.93)
[Linux] Ctrl+C no longer causes build progress to be lost on Linux (Thanks to comicfans)
Keep-alive timeout was too low, causing dropped connections during distributed compilation
Prevent unsafe caching of precompiled headers that differ only in unused defines (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
Fix rare crash when using distributed compilation
Distributed job local memory limit is now correctly respected
Prevent rare crash when using distributed compilation (Thanks to Jean-Sebastien Pelletier)
[OSX] Fix init failure on some configurations when using -dist due to TCP send/recv buffer size (Thanks to myevan)
Fix socket leak when send/recv buffer size could not be set
Prevent network disconnections due to too small Send timeouts
DirCopy no longer fails if a source file is deleted (Thanks to kwayle)
Remote workers failing to read files no longer fail without error (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
Fix -wrapper mode on Windows if fbuild.exe is renamed (Thanks to James Leitch)
Exe name is printed correctly in usage info if exe is renamed (Thanks to James Leitch)
Exe name is printed correctly in usage info on OSX and Linux (Thanks to James Leitch)
MSVC linker and lib warnings shown when not using /WX (Thanks to Lambert Clara)
[Linux] CopyFile and CopyDir transfer file permissions on copy (Thanks to Javier Blazquez)

Improvements

[Experimental] New -fastcancel option allows immediate termination on build failure (Thanks to Jean-Sebastien Pelletier)
Remote internal compiler errors will be retried to avoid breaks due to faulty hardware (Thanks to Sam Hocevar)
Paths inside VisualStudio projects are relative where possible, including Intellisense (Thanks to Eric Arnold)
[Windows] FASTBuild supports >64 cores on x64 and >32 cores on x86 (Thanks to missmah)
Visual Studio projects can be generated with generic source bindings via ProjectSccEntrySAK (Thanks to Lucian Muresan)
Increase distributed job local memory limit to 1GiB (was 512MiB)
Add work around for bugs in MS Linker causing PDB corruption (LNK1318), seen in VS2017
Add basic documentation for operator + when used on Structs
Lib uses source objects for other libs where possible (Thanks to Javier Blazquez)
Add link to Syntax highlighting link by Manuzor (Thanks to Manuzor)
Distributed compilation worked limit can be set via .WorkerConnectionLimit
Add -distverbose command line to help with troubleshooting distributed compilation issues
Improve summary output for CopyFile, CopyDir and RemoveDir
.BuildLogFile path can be set for generated Visual Studio projects (thanks to lucianm)
Libraries are flattened for non-MSVC librarian when nesting libs (Thanks to Javier Blazquez)
New FASTBUILD_TEMP_PATH env var can set TEMP dir for FASTBuild to use (Thanks to comicfans)
Objects and Libs are only deleted before building if using -clean, reducing overhead
Small memory usage and performance optimization during builds and bff parsing
Avoid opening files unnecessarily when #once directive is used

Notes

DB Version Changed : clean build will occur
Distributed protocol version has changed

New

New .SimpleDistributionMode allows distributed compilation of arbitrary single file objects (Thanks to gkoreman)

Fixes

Prevent error D8049 when compiling remotely with really long command line args
Fix missing depencies when using Clang with empty files and mixed line endings (Thanks to Wickerwaka)
Fix unescaped ampersands in VCXProject documentation
[Linux][OSX] Fix cache paths using wrong slash type (Thanks to dummyunit)
Slashes are escaped in response files for ar.exe in Windows (useful when building for Android)
Assignment of .String to .ArrayOfStrings silently failing in some cases
Cache plugin DLL is correctly handled on X86 Windows
Copy, CSAssembly and Unity can have PreBuildDependencies which are ObjectLists
Alias .Targets can be ObjectLists
Libraries are rebuilt when Librarian changes
Correct documentation for -ide option (add note about -ideo enabling -fixuperrorpaths on Windows only)

Improvements

XCode Projects now support CodeSense
Support for optional environment variables via "#if exists(VAR_NAME)" (Thanks to Javier Blazquez)
[Linux][OSX] New LZ4 (v1.7.4.2) improves compression speed for OSX and Linux ~10-30%, improving cache performance
BFF parsing speed significantly increased (upto 2x)
Exec() can have a PreBuildDependency on a CopyDir node
.CustomEnvironmentVariables can be set for distributed compilation (Thanks to gkoreman)
.ExecutableRootPath can control root of distributed toolchains (Thanks to gkoreman)
Allow string properties to be set to empty strings if they are optional
Compiler exposes .ClangRewriteIncludes to allow use of -frewrite-includes to be disabled if needed
Add Sublime Text markup (Thanks to Andreas Haferburg)

Notes

DB Version Changed : clean build will occur
Cache version has changed : Existing cache entries will be ignored

New

[Experimental] -monitor option writes a machine-readable log for external visualizers (Thanks to Yass007 and LiamKF)
bash completion script for fbuild executable now available (Thanks to dummyunit)

Fixes

Prevent MSVC Error C1382 due to an .obj and .pch mismatch due to multiple machines partially populating the cache
FASTBuild is no longer incompatilble with Clang's static analyzer (-analyze) (Thanks to Pavel Bibergal)
Fix various MSVC compiler args not being detected when using -X instead of /X syntax
Fix various MSVC linker args not being detected when using -X instead of /X syntax
Fix various MSVC linker args being assumed to be case-sensitive (linker args are case insensitive)
Linking against Orbis .prxs built by FASTBuild uses _stub_weak.a (Thanks to jairbubbles)
Fix CopyDir destination path not being normalized causing failures
Fix typo in Report when there are no includes (Thanks to Leandros)
-showtargets now includes targets defined by ObjectList and Unity
.Target property in XCodeProject() .Configs is optional
Removing empty strings in bff with operator - is ignored instead of being incredibly slow (Thanks to dummyunit)

Improvements

Solution() allows the same folder to be specified multiple times for added flexibility (Thanks to Poppolopoppo)
Documentation for Test() (Thanks to Manuzor)
ObjectList(), Library() and CSAssembly() support .CompilerInputPatternExclude (Thanks to Fitzymj)
Added .TestAlwaysShowOutput option to Test() which prints the test output even if it passes
Optimize network sends, reducing kernel call overhead
Improved diagnostic messages for distributed compilation (Thanks to Sam Hocevar)
Copy() .Source can now be empty as this allows for greater configuration flexibility
An invalid .Target in an XCode configuration will now fail during bff parsing

Notes

DB Version Changed : clean build will occur
Cache Version changed : prior version cache items will be ignored

Fixes

Array of Structures behaves consistently with Array of Strings (Thanks to dummyunit)

Empty arrays are now essentially treated as untyped

Edge cases which allowed variables to silently change type are now prevented (Thanks to dummyunit)
Integer addition works with explicit values as well as variables (Thanks to dummyunit)
Database detects when it is moved or copied, avoiding difficult to diagnose build errors
Fix crash when .UnityInputFiles and .UnityInputIsolateWritableFiles were used together
Pre-build deletion of MSVC pch object file didn't work in some cases
TestTimeOut value is correctly interpretted as being in seconds (not milliseconds)

Improvements

Optimizations:

Precompiled Header with MSVC can be cached
Precompiled header acceleration is no longer disabled for MSVC when writing to the cache

Empty arrays can now be treated as arrays of structures (Thanks to dummyunit)
Allow for longer variable names in BFF files (256 vs 64) (Thanks to poppolopoppo)
Subtraction operator behaviour is handled more consistently (Thanks to dummyunit)
Bools and Ints can be formatted into string with $var$ syntax (Thanks to poppolopoppo)
CSAssembly supports PreBuildDependencies (Thanks to poppolopoppo)
Unity supports PreBuildDependencies
BFF syntax now supports #else directive
Remove .PCHOptionsDeoptimized option - it's not useful and causes problems
Use Clang's -frewrite-includes option to avoid preprocessing inconsistencies (Thanks to Jean-Sebastien Pelletier)

Notes

DB Version Changed : clean build will occur
Behaviour Change: code compiled with /ZW can now be cached

New

VCXProject can automatically derive intellisense settings if new Target property is set
.SolutionPlatform and .SolutionConfig added to Visual Studio sln generation (Thanks to Agga)
.CompilerInputFilesRoot allows root path setting for .obj path generation for explicitly listed files (Thanks to Sergey Makeev)
Test() supports an optional .TestTimeOut, after which it will be terminated with failure

Fixes

Warnings shown when using Microsoft compiler, even if "warnings as errors" (/WX) is not enabled (Thanks to matlec)
Avoid anonymous namespace conflicts with distributed compilation with MS Compiler (Thanks to Sergey Makeev)
[OSX][Linux] Fix occasional hang in process spawning
[OSX] Overridden environment is correctly set for spawned processes
Fix corrupt solution generation when Folder path is specified with a trailing slash
Prevent exit being delayed when some workers are incommunicado (cuts as much as 2s off some no-op builds)
BFFs changes are correctly detected when switching between .bff files using -config option (Thanks to Jalal El Mansouri)
Fix cmdline usage info for FBuildWorker (should read -mode=dedicated not -mode=always)
Create directory for .pdb and .asm files if different from .obj file (Thanks to Tengato)
[OSX][Linux] -ide was reformatting errors on OSX/Linux, preventing IDEs (like XCode) parsing them

Improvements

Optimizations:

Reduce time to hand out and accept distributed compilation
Optimize large command line processing, reducing overhead spawning processes with > 4KiB of cmd line
[Windows] Reduce process spawning overhead by ~8ms on average
Speed up worker discovery when some workers are incommunicado (improves distributed compilation performance)
Hostname to IP resolution of valid workers no longer stalled by incommunicado worker timeout

Config files hash is used during parsing to reduce rebuilds on edit/revert (Thanks to dummyunit)
Rebuilding is minimized when manually switching between .bff files using -config option (Thanks to Jalal El Mansouri)
.natvis fils are included in project generation by default for enhanced debugging support in VS
.ProjectPatternToExclude can be used to exclude files from project generation (Thanks to Keith Gunning)
Add support for caching /ZW (Windows Runtime) object files (Thanks to ClxS)
Continued work on distributed compilation for OSX and Linux

New

Operator '-' can be used to remove substrings from strings
-showtargets cmdline option displays primary build targets (Thanks to Cyberkm)

Fixes

Precompiled headers used with GCC now work correctly (acceleration is no longer prevented)
-include option is correctly handled with GCC and Clang
Exec() works with non-zero return codes on Linux and OS X
Fix race condition in shutdown of fbuild that could cause an extremely rare hang
Correct position of arrow for error 1009 and 1034 in some situations
FBuildWorker only checks free space of drive containing temp directory

Improvements

Small optimization (0-10%) to cache storage and retrieval (updated LZ4 from r127 to r131)
When specifying an invalid target on the cmdline, similar targets are suggested (Thanks to poppolopoppo)
Avoid local hostname lookup when not running in distributed compilation mode for small speedup

Note

DB version has changed : clean build will occur
Cache version changed : existing cached items will be ignored.

New

Support dependency tracking for Qt resource files (.qrc)
RemoveDir can be used to create cleanup build steps (Thanks to Poppolopoppo)
Optional .LinkerType on DLL & Executable allows explicit specification of linker type (Thanks to Josh Green)
Caching and Distribution can be disabled for an ObjectList or Library using
Variable names can by dynamically constructed, such as: .Var = ."MyThing_$Config$" (Thanks to Poppolopoppo)

Fixes

Config (.bff) #include works when a full path is specified
Prevent Compiler() node from unnecessarily re-hashing files in some cases
Fix Compiler() node not re-hashing in some cases
.Environment in Settings() is now respected on Linux and OS X
Fix stale dependency when a file in an ObjectList() fed into Unity() is deleted or moved
Both command lines are shown when doing two-stage compilation and -verbose or -showcmds is used
Ensure command line length limit is correctly respected in all cases
Automatically handle response file line length limit with MS tools (avoid LNK1170)
Fix caching when output object is *.cpp.obj (e.g. Unreal Build Tool)
Don't let inaccessible drives trigger low-space disabling of FBuildWorker
Parent scoping ^ now works correctly with ^X = { .Y } syntax
A parse-time error will be emitted for conflicting files listed in Compiler()
Fix crash caching of objects with preprocessed source > 2GiB (replace MurmurHash3a with xxHash)
Treat remote failure with 0xC0000142 (Windows) as system error and retry (occurs during "force shutdown screen") (Thanks to Jean-Sebastien Pelletier)
-nostoponerror no longer skips some parts of hierarchy when errors occur (Thanks to Jean-Sebastien Pelletier)

Improvements

Report an error when command line is too long and response files can't be used
Cache plugin now supported for OS X and Linux (Thanks to gdaow)
Cache lookup using faster hashing algorithm (replace MurmurHash3a with xxHash)
Add work-around for VS2012 Compiler enum pre-processing bug (Thanks to Jean-Sebastien Pelletier)
VCXProject supports wildcards for file extensions
Work towards feature parity on OS X and Linux

Note

DB version has changed : clean build will occur

New

The Intel Compiler is now a supported compiler (icl.exe)
Variable prefix ^ allows access/modification of higher-level scope variables (Thanks to poppolopoppo)
#define/#undef directives allow for user defined tokens (thanks to Poppolopoppo)

Fixes

Fix missing dependency in some cases where #include was preceded by whitespace with MSVC compiler
Prevent jobs being accepted if disk-space drops below threshold after a build has already started
Improve detection of disk space failures with MSVC compiler
Support /IMPLIB for Executables with MSVC Linker (Thanks to Josh Green)
link.exe is recognized as a valid librarian, since it can be used with /LIB (Thanks to Josh Green)
Fix VS Solution generated GUIDs being inconsistent in some situations, causing Solution to always be "dirty" (Thanks to Arttu Peltonen)

Improvements

FBuildWorker UI shows warning in title when disk-space is low
Missing documentation for Exec() .ExecReturnCode added (thanks to Josh Green)
Exec() has new .UseStdOutAsOutput option, for executables which don't normally generate a file (thanks to Josh Green)
Exec() function now supports multiple inputs (Thanks to Josh Green)
Support for negating #if directive - i.e. #if !TOKEN (thanks to Poppolopoppo)
Add .SourceBasePath to Copy() function - allows duplicating partial source path hierarchies into destination
Multiple Wildcard Support:

CompilerInputPattern (CSAssembly, ObjectList and Library) supports multiple wildcards
UnityInputPattern (Unity) supports multiple wildcards
SourcePathsPattern (CopyDir) supports multiple wildcards

Optimizations:

Latency of local job consumption is reduced by upto 15ms
Optimize include discovery with MSVC compiler when using the preprocessor (cached or distributed compilation)

Visual Studio Solution Generation:

VSSolution Folder structs support String or ArrayOfStrings for .Project list
VSSolution .SolutionProjects is now optional to avoid duplication in .SolutionFolders
VSSolution supports setting inter-project dependencies; Useful in some situations

Note

DB version has changed : clean build will occur

Fixes

More robust fix for bug causing unnecessary rebuilds with MSVC compiler in some situations

if a warning was generated, and /WX was not enabled, an invalid path could enter the dependency database
bug introduced in v0.84

Note

DB version has changed : clean build will occur

Fixes

Fix bug causing unnecessary rebuilds with MSVC compiler in some situations

if a warning was generated, and /WX was not enabled, an invalid path could enter the dependency database
bug introduced in v0.84

Note

DB version has changed : clean build will occur
Behaviour of operator + on structs has changed

New

#import directive allows importation of environment variables (Thanks to Poppolopoppo)
Workers will self-deactivate when low on disk space (Thanks to Jean-Sebastien Pelletier)
Visual Studio Solution generation (thanks to Poppolopoppo)
Add "-nostoponerror" option: Try to build as much as possible instead of stopping on the first error

Fixes

Includes are correctly tracked when using /showIncludes with non-English MSVC compiler (Thanks to Poppolopoppo)
.StructA + .StructB results in members being recursively concatenated instead of replaced (Thanks to Poppolopoppo)
Recognize -c as well as /c when checking for required compiler options with MSVC
[OSX/Linux] Fix crash using -report
Automatically strip /Gm compiler option with MSVC compiler (incompatible with FASTBuild)
Compiled object extension defaults to .o on Linux/OS X
Fix formatting of ToolManifest errors so they appear in VS Error Window (Thanks to Josh Green)
Warn about invalid values passed to -j[x] option (local thread count) (values <0 or >64 are invalid)
Prevent UnityNode excluded file list containing duplicates if using Precompiled Headers
Ensure path exists /IMPLIB option if different from normal output to prevent linker option (Thanks to Josh Green)
Fix crash when using /Fi or /P command line option with MSVC compiler (Thanks to Poppolopoppo)

Improvements

Print() can now output any variable, array or structure with new Print( .Var ) syntax
Optimizations

Reduce latency starting a new jobs on a remote worker
Reduce latency returning completed remote jobs
Workers request 1 more job than available CPUs to overlap network transfer and compilation
Reduce remote worker thread context switches

#include now supports variable substitutions (e.g. #include "Compilers/$VSVersion$.h") (Thanks to Poppolopoppo)
Excluded files support relative paths (starting with ../ or ..\) (Unity, ObjectList, Library and CSAssembly)

Note

DB version has changed : clean build will occur

Fixes

Fix formating of "-nooutputbuffering is deprecated" message
Fix Exec and Copy steps fed explicitly to ObjectList/Library (via .CompilerInputFiles) being ignored
Fix ObjectList sometimes being displayed as "??" in the -report output
Don't look for import .lib when linking a DLL unless using the MS linker
Unity() correctly depends on .UnityInputFiles that are output by other build steps

Improvements

BFF parsing no longer complains about missing libs (leave this upto the linker)
CompilerInputUnity can accept multiple Unity inputs in ObjectList() and Library()
Unity can take output of an ObjectList(s) as input via new UnityInputObjectLists
Add CompilerOutputPrefix option to ObjectList() and Library()
Optimizations

Reduce latency of Worker requesting jobs from Client
Avoid remote workers underrequesting jobs when available job count is low (start and end of build)
Use timing information from previous builds to improve local and remote scheduling
Compile time improved slightly by using reponse files only when args are > 32767 characters
Small optimization to console output
Reduce external process invocation overhead by upto 16ms
Reduce main thread context switches

Note

DB version has changed : clean build will occur
Location of compiled object files has changed (now in relative sub-dirs)
"-nooutputbuffering" is deprecated: output is now always written in a timely fashion

Fixes

Object files are built into sub dirs, avoiding "Conflicting objects found:" for cpp files with the same name in the same library
Unity node no longer silently ignores input files that don't exist
[Linux][OS X] Fix missing progress bar on Linux and OS X
Fix dll (-shared and -dynamiclib) detection for gcc/clang linker

Improvements

Auto-fixup incorrectly escaped closing quotes in MSVC include paths (common user error)
Detect missing /c or -c compiler options (common user error)
Total build time shown is more accurate (includes -summary and -report time)
CompilerOutputpath in ObjectList and Library is auto-slash terminated
Optimizations

Network brokerage is no longer accessed if not in distributed mode
Optimize thread pool creation, saving upto 16ms per cpu core
Reduce all job scheduling latency by upto 30ms
Optimized scheduling to eliminate additional latency in various situations
Optimize unity file generation
Optimize database loading for Compiler() nodes by eliminating unnecessary IO
Reduce latency of distributed compilation by disabling TCP Nagle
Reduce context switches on network threads (FBuild and FBuildWorker)
Eliminate unnecessary progress calculation during shutdown
Reduce context switches on main thread
Optimized -summary output
Optimized all console output slightly

Note

DB version has changed : clean build will occur

New

Add custom preprocessor support for ObjectList and Library (Thanks to Jussi Knuuttila):
This allows for:

Different complier version for preprocessor
Completely different preprocessor (e.g. clang)
Compiler for preprocessor/dependency tracking, combined with calling a custom tool

Fixes

[Linux] UnityInputExcludedFiles is now case-sensitive on Linux
Includes now discovered correctly with Clang for Windows and -fms-compatibility
Avoid LNK4221 warning when all files in a unity are isolated due to .UnityInputIsolateWritableFiles
Fix incorrect 'missing despite success' error message when primary compiler executable is not found

Improvements

Print "WARNING:" instead of "PROBLEM:" in output when compiler passes, but emits text to stderr (like msvc when /nologo is not specified)
Show exe path when failing to spawn linker (typically due to bad path to exe)
Add CompilerInputExcludedFiles option to ObjectList, Library and CSNode (Thanks to Jean-Sebastien Pelletier)

Note

DB version has changed : clean build will occur
Protocol version changed : update workers

New

OS X & Linux now supported (Alpha)

All features except distributed compilation (coming in Beta)

Add #if/#endif directives to assist in cross-platform bff configs
Add built-in __WINDOWS__, __LINUX__ & __OSX__ symbols for use with #if

Fixes

Toolchain distribution is correctly uniquified when compiler uses exe name to alter behaviour (PS4 Clang)
Aliases to missing items will now report an error at build time
Use response files to avoid command line limit on Windows when compiling C# (Thanks to Vitalii Trubchaninov)
Linking a dynamic library created with GCC/SNC/Clang in a subsequent link step no longer causes an error

Improvements

Support multiple concurrent FASTBuilds if run in different root folders (Thanks to Vitalii Trubchaninov)

Note

DB version has changed : clean build will occur
Various internal changes to prepare for Linux & OSX

New

Unity supports wildcard ExcludePattern (String or ArrayOfStrings)

Fixes

Fix path canonicalization bug for files with double slashes in path
Cache path env variable is no longer ignored when Settings() is missing in BFF
Database is once again saved when Ctrl+C is used from cmd line (broken in v0.73)
Fix potential crash in string/path manipulation
Test now correctly detects write failure when storing results to disk
Avoid hanging parent process if FBuildWorker launched from script/Visual Studio

Improvements

Detect and report as error missing %1 or %2 args for Compiler/Librarian/Linker
Remove unnecessary re-parsing of BFF when cache path changes
Out of disc space on remote worker for detected and handeld for MSVC, GCC and Clang
Precompiled header generation is prioritized during scheduling

Note

Distributed protocol version changed; update workers (Updated to isolate from workers without fixes from v0.72+)
Various internal changes to prepare for Linux & OSX

Fixes

Fix broken incremental linking with MSVC compiler (.ilk and .pdb were being deleted every time)
Fix bug handling UNC paths in CachePath (leading double slashes were not respected)
Fix double quotes not correctly canonizalized in some situations
Stop LinkerStampExe being incorrectly attached to the link line

Improvements

Remove some unnecessary command line manipulation with MSVC compiler for Recode compatibility

Improvements

Large optimization for highly recursive dependency graphs
Progress calculation optimized
Progress calculation accuracy greatly improved

Note

Database version changed : Clean build will occur
Various internal changes to prepare for Linux & OSX

New

CopyDir function - copy contents of one or more directories

Improvements

Add explicit check and error msg for missing DLLs on remote machine
Alias can refer directly to files not built by FASTBuild

Fixes

Massive speedup to directory listing performance when dealing with > 4096 files
Copy() dest timestamp is correctly set when using PreBuildDependencies
#once include directive not being respected in some cases
Fix included bff being considered always dirty in some cases
VCXProjectNodes can be referenced as files (allows copying)
Various cases where empty strings was not correctly reported as error 1004
Empty Alias() .Targets is reported as an error instead of silently doing nothing

Note

Database version changed : Clean build will occur
Various internal changes to prepare for Linux & OSX

New

Link steps (DLL/Exe) have new options for post-link in-place stamping (.LinkerStampExe and .LinkerStampExeArgs)

Fixes

Preserve case of files discovered during compilation
Fix BFF parser crash caused by unterminated strings, arrays or structs under some circumstances (now emit Error 1002)
Ensure UnityInputExcludedFiles works correctly with full paths
Ensure directories for VS Project generation are created before use
Clang detection: *clang[.exe] and *clang-cl[.exe] detected in addition to existing *clang++[.exe]

Note

Database version changed : Clean build will occur

New

Support for Wii toolchain (CodeWarrior)
Support for WiiU toolchain (GreenHills)
Support for CUDA (nvcc.exe) compiler

Improvements

Synchronized compiler files are locked by FBuildWorker.exe to prevent deletion on remote machine
Project generation includes CUDA *.cu files by default

Fixes

UnityInputExcludedFiles matches only full filenames instead of just matching the end of file names
UnityInputExcludedFiles are canonicalized so double slashes no longer cause failure to exclude files
Gracefully handle compiler being terminated remotely due to shutdown of PC

Note

DB version has been increased; clean build will result after upgrading
Distributed worker protocol has changed; update workers

New

"-showcmds" option shows commands being executed during compilation (far less verbose than verbose)
"-cpus=n" option allows number of cpus to be controlled from the command line
"-mode=x" option allows worker mode to be controlled from the command line
"-wait" command line options to allow queueing of multiple builds
Add DeoptimizeWritableFiles option (use deoptimized settings for writable files)

Improvements

Prevent Executables/DLLs re-linking when a DLL they depend on changes, but the interface stays the same
Incremental link files (.ilk) deleted before linking when doing a -clean build
PDB files deleted before linking (if non-incremental) to avoid pdb bloat and link slowdown
Automatically strip /MP argument for MSVC compilers (FASTBuild controlls the parallelization)

Fixes

Differentiate remote "system" failures from compilation failures
- a remote failure will cause the worker to be deny listed and the task retried on another worker
- remote failure on 3 different workers will fail as before (indicates a configuration problem)
Error path fixup now handles "remark:" and "fatal error:" style messages
Fix path fixup for SNC compiler output (errors, warnings etc)
PS4 linker uses response files to avoid 32KiB cmd line limit
PS4 linker tracks library dependencies passed directly on compiler command line
FBuildWorker.exe correctly exits on WM_CLOSE notifications (taskkill for example) instead of minimizing
PreBuildDependencies are correctly processed for -summary and -report

Note

DB version has been increased; clean build will result after upgrading
Cache format has changed; existing cache data will be ignored
Distributed worker protocol has changed; update workers

New

Distributed compilation is no longer in Beta.

Improvements

Cache size & speed optimizations
- Cache compression switched to LZ4
- 20-30% reduced output size (less space used on cache, less network transfer)
- 20-30% faster compression (less time spent on local machine when storing to cache)
- 600% faster decompression speed (when decompressing on local machine after retrieval from cache)
FBuildWorker can use tools synchronized from a previous run to reduce network IO
Distributed compilation speed optimizations
- Replace distributed compilation compression with LZ4
- 50% reduced transfer size (half the data sent to remote machine, half the memory usage locally when pending)
- 230% faster compression speed (less time spent compressing before sending)
- 700% faster decompression speed (7x less work to decompress on remote machine)
Use 64bit MurMur3 hash for faster/better cache key generation
- 300% faster hash of preprocessed cache input
- Less chance of collisions vs CRC32
- Using 64bits MurMur3 for further reduced collision potential
Optimize include parsing for all compilers
Support /7i and /ZI debug format for distribution with MSVC compiler

Fixes

Handle tool synchronization failure properly to avoid leaked jobs
Fix remote worker over-requesting jobs when not using full cpu allocation (was causing reduced scheduling efficiency)
Includes no longer implictly push an addition {} scope (this was preventing includes being useful in many cases)
-config args are correctly passed to sub-process when in -vs or -wrapper mode
Fix race condition preventing copy in FBuildWorker auto-restart, causing update to fail

Note

DB version has changed: full build will occur
Wrapper Mode (-wrapper) is now active as part of Visual Studio mode (-vs)

New

FBuildWorker will auto-restart when updated (i.e. new version sync'd from revision control)

Improvements

Allow ObjectList, Library and CSAssembly to take multiple exclusion paths
Add "DeploymentType" and "DeploymentFiles" to vcxproj generation for Xbox360
.m and .mm files are included in vcxproj generation by default
Multiple targets are built in parallel
Cost of progress calculation is massively reduced
Remotely compiled tasks are written to the cache on return
-summary shows total remote CPU time
Reduce FBuildWorker CPU usage when worker is idle

Fixes

Deoptimized compilation settings were being ignored if using distributed compilation
Files using /FI (Force Include) with MSVC compiler compile correctly when using the cache or distribution
Fix -summary time output when building multiple targets
Consider PreBuildDependencies correctly in progress estimation
Fix report/chart colours not working in -report due to bad html
Fix bad report generation when using ObjectList
Fix collapsable report sections in IE and Firefox
Correct -summary build count for remotely compiled objects
Locally build distributable tasks can be written to the cache
Correct use of reponse files with orbis-ar.exe which requires slashes to be escaped in file

Note

DB version has been increased; clean build will result after upgrading
Cache format has changed; existing cache data will be ignored
Distributed worker protocol has changed; update workers

New

Cache Plugin Architecture - allows cache IO functionality to be provided by a plugin dll

Improvements

Distributed Compilation

Increase distributed connection limit to 15
Minimization state of worker is persisted between runs
Worker default CPU allocation is 50%
Add icon the FBuildWorker.exe
Memory usage for distributed compilation is massively reduced
Distributed compilation will race remaining remote jobs locally, when there is no other work to do

Improve validation of .LinkerOutput argument (ensure a file and not a path is provided)
Safely handle empty libraries passed to linker .Libraries
Check for and handle truncated data being returned from the cache

Fixes

Distributed Compilation

Fix crash in worker when compilation error contains %
Fix job leak causing hang when synchronizing the same toolchain for 2 clients at the same time
Prevent some unsafe access to management structures on Worker
Fix potentially long shutdown when a remote worker is unresponsive
Prevent potential hangs in networking
Fix memory leak in worker if disconnected during tool synchronization

Fix crash when doing multiple rapid build/cancel cyles with -wrapper mode
Use the compiler toolchain hash in the cache key
Fix inability to detect fully pathed libs passed to .LinkerOptions
Detect MSVC linker correctly when provided as file only (i.e. relying on system path for discovery)
Fix path canonicalization when a relative path begins with a slash
Fix crash if cache path is empty, or a UNC path only to a machine
A failure in one of multiple targets on the command line no longer causes all subsequent tasks to fail
Librarian step uses response files to avoid 32KiB command line length limit

Note

DB version has been increased; clean build will result after upgrading

New

[BETA] Distributed compilation support
Deoptimization of writable files containing FASTBUILD_DEOPTIMIZE_OBJECT token

Improvements

Project Generation

Generated projects can directly launch/debug PS3/PS4
Allow options to be set per-configuration
Many new project generation options exposed
Supports multiple base paths

Caching

Show cache hits in standard output
Caching automatically disabled for files isolated from unity
Cache mode can be controlled via FASTBUILD_CACHE_MODE environment variable ('r', 'w' or 'rw')
Allow cache path to be set via an environment variable "FASTBUILD_CACHE_PATH"

FASTBuild runs at below normal priority for improved machine responsiveness
When MS linker crashes and we retry, supress the error to prevent visual studio from failing
Exec with -verbose prints in a cut and pasteble format to assist config debugging
Saving of the dependency graph is performed atomically to reduce chance of corruption if fbuild.exe is terminated during DB serialization
[BETA] Add "-wrapper" command line argument for Process Isolation. Allows graceful shutdown when terminated from Visual Studio.
Add .PreBuildDependencies to Copy() and Exec()
Add '-fixuperrorpaths' command line to reformat GCC/SNC/Clang errors to Visual Studio format
Prevent two objects being built to the same obj
Enabled Unity generation on multiple threads
PrecompiledHeader is used when locally building a distributable job, or if cache is in read-only mode

Fixes

Prevent #pragma messages being incorrectly parsed as includes in some cases with GCC/SNC/Clang
Fix -I arguments not being removed from Clang when using preprocessed output
Precompiled headers with Clang are not prevented from working usefully
Don't try to use precompiled headers in link step with GCC/SNC/Clang
Project generation LocalDebuggerWorkingDirectory written to correct part of project
Fix missing carriage return in output with --help
Exec with -verbose prints args after substitutions (%1 etc)
Handle UNC cache path correctly
Format FASTBuild errors so that column is interpretted by VisualStudio correctly
Fix performance degradation when failure output is massive (>1MiB) - (e.g. link failure)
Correctly return error when multiple targets are built and one fails
Replace pattern matching of FindNextFile with our own (so *.cpp doesn't return files like *.cpp~)
Fix items not under project path not being double clickable
Library() deleted libraries before creation to ensure old symbols don't remain in library
Prevent bff included with ../ being considered dirty every time

Note

DB version has been increased; clean build will result after upgrading
BFF includes are now relative to includer (no "system" includes)

New

Clang & PS4 support
Add #once pragma which allows BFF files to be included multiple times, but parsed only once
MSVC linker crashes (LNK1000) will be retried once as work around for bug in x64 incremental linker

Improvements

VCXProject creates projects which are compatible with VS2010 as well as 2012/2013
VCXProject can specify debugger args (working dir, startup exe etc)
Path canonicalization handles \.\ and \..\ for better consistency in target names
Failure find include shows full path of where the include was expected to be found
Greatly improve performance of VS project generation when there are many folders
Dependencies passed directly to linker (instead of .Libraries) and have their dependencies tracked
Copy step shows source and dest for copy in tty
-verbose mode will specify the reason for building any nodes
Exec function supports build time substitutions %1 (input) and %2 (output)
/IMPLIB supported for MSVC linker. Import lib specified will be used by dependent dlls.
Show in output when DB version has changed and rebuild will occur
Show when BFF files are modified and config re-parsing will occur
CachePath of wrong type emits an error instead of silently being ignored
Various system error messages are now formatted to appear in Visual Studio error window
Improve GCC detection - recognize g++ as well as gcc
Repeat name of object when compilation fails so task is clear

Fixes

Caching can be safely used on objects using precompiled headers with MSVC, avoiding missing debug info.
CLR code is not distributed/cached (compiler bug prevents safe use of the preprocessor)
Fix temp file writing failure detection (ensure whole file is written)
Compiler and Linker use response files to avoid Windows 32KiB args limit
Detect cyclic BFF include dependencies and report new Error 1035 instead of crashing with stack overflow
Correctly detect changes to BFF files with the same name when one is bff relative and one is in the system directory
Fix duplicate folders in generated VS project, causing project size bloat
Correctly handle '-o FileName' as well as '-oFileName' arguments with GCC/SNC compiler when manipulating args
Fix error in command line arguments to SNC when using cache
Fix bad file extension for preprocessed temp file with SNC compiler
Disable cache when using /ZW (consume WinRT) with MSVC compiler due to incompatibility
Fix cache sensitivity on working dir drive letter causing cache misses
Correct reversed types in Error 1027 with String + ArrayOfStrings
Fix formatting so first error with GCC/SNC is always double-clickable in Visual Studio

Note

DB version has been increased; clean build will result after upgrading

New

VisualStudio project generation
New .LinkerLinkObjects option on Executable() & DLL() allows control over linking objects instead of libs.
New .CompilerForceUsing option on Library() and ObjectList(), with %4 build-time substitution for use with MSVC /FU option.
New .LinkerAssemblyResources option on Executable() & DLL(), with %3 build-time substitution for use with MSVC /ASSEMBLYRESOURCE option.
New .PreBuildDependencies option for Library(), allows forced execution of an external process before a Library/ObjectList is built to better support extenal code generation.
New ObjectList() function allows building a list of items without linking into a library, to support buiding objects or resources without making libraries.
.LibrarianAdditionalInputs option on Library() to allow merging of objects, libraries or resources built externally or with Exec() or ObjectList().

Improvements

Add '.UnityInputFiles' option to allow an explicit file list to be provided to a Unity node
Support various assignment/concatenation oprerations with ArrayOfStrings and ArrayOfStructs
For libraries with mixed Unity and Non-Unity nodes, favour Unity nodes for compilation
Prioritize linking over compiling to reduce DLL bottlenecks
Job queue manipulation overhead is reduced
DLL & Executable support referencing a library or dll via a copy (to ensure the copy happens at build time)
Copy() supports multiple inputs if an output path is specified
Unity files emit #pragma messages to clearly show file being compiled in case of failure
.CompilerOutputExtension can be specified on Library() to control the extension for built objects
FASTBuild emits an error and exits if another instance is already running
Allow use of %3 Compiler build-time expansion for PCH object in object compilation as well as precompiled header compilation

Fixes

Escaping correctly works for all characters, not just "
-summary option shows cache hit time for cache hit nodes, instead of last known build time
Prevent a race where some additional jobs could be started after a failed task
Fix incorrect error message when attempting to concatenate Struct to ArrayOfStrings
Fix crash when self-assigning variables (i.e. .MyString = .MyString)
Assignment of structs was functioning as a concatenation (was keeping old members when it shouldn't)
Handle quoted build-time substitutions correctly to support spaces in paths (i.e. "%1" becomes "A" "B" "C" (instead of "A B C")
Unity uses "" style includes (instead of <>) to satisfy compilers like Clang
Fix bug causing massive slowdown generating large reports (-report)
Fix output to stdout being truncated to 8KiB in some cases when using -verbose
Copy can reference an alias as a source, including those aliasing multiple inputs
Correct bad formatting of Exec node in -verbose mode
Executable & DLL linking can accept an input built by Executable()
Fix failure to extract includes when include as on last line with no carriage return

Note

DB version has been increased; clean build will result after upgrading

New

New -report command line argument which outputs a detailed report of the build, including:
- Processing time by item.
- Processing time by library.
- Processing time by type (obj, exe, dll etc).
- Cache statistics.
- Include file usage.
Add 'UnityInputIsolateWritableFiles' to unity generation. Allows files which are "open for edit" in revision control to be built individually to speed up iterative compile times.

Improvements

Tests can reference execuable via alias
-verbose output for Objects is improved: Timing is more accurate and number of includes found is displayed.
Include processing optimizations
Dependency graph traversal optimizations
Progress estimation optimizations
Large database load/save time is greatly reduced
Database size is greatly reduced
Total build time includes some previously excluded overheads
Job queue contention optimization
Small optimization to Unity generation

Fixes

Avoid using preprocessor with MSVC compiler unnecessarily
Fix C# dependencies not being tracked properly when using -clean
Fix C# dependencies not being tracked correctly for multiple explicitly listed .cs files
GCC includes not being correcly detected
MSVC includes being missed on some rare occasions
Fix poor unity splitting logic resulting in bad distribution and occassional empty unity files
Cache stats in -summary were not being displayed when in "writeonly" mode
Cache commit to existing entry no longer results in removal of entry
Allow concatenation of a String variable to an ArrayOfStrings variable instead of generating error 1034
Copy step outputs a line to the tty during build, consistent with other tasks
Copy outputs detailed information when -verbose is used
Copy outputs a failure message when copy fails
Fix progress calculation reaching 100% before completion
Fix small memory leak when generating unity files
Handle some highly unlikely cases of failing to set file time for cache retrieval
Empty arrays containing whitespace or comments are now handled correctly

Note

DB version has been increased; clean build will result after upgrading

Improvements

Language Syntax Enhancements

A new variable of type Struct can be defined, grouping other variables
Structures can be kept in Arrays and Arrays can be iterated over
A new Using function takes all the variables in a Struct and pushes them into the current scope
Add Print function to assist debugging configurations
Allow 0 size ForEach loops
Allow String to be concantenated to ArrayOfStrings

Build Functionality Enhancements

Add SNC compiler detection
Add Exec() function - calls an arbitrary executable to create a file
Test() function can use existing executable, as well as one built by FASTBuild

Static libs and DLLs automatically use precompiled header obj files
Errors are output contiguously, improving readability when there are multiple failed nodes
Improve thread number output when compiling with > 9 threads
Unity 'InputUnityExludePath' supports multiple exlude paths
More detailed errors when failing to write temp files
Linker failure message is imrproved (specifies Dll or Exe, rather than just "Linker")
Add wesbite and copyright info to "-version" output
Show total time taken by node type in -summary output
Various -summary formatting enhancements
Small performance improvement for processing very large objects

Fixes

DLL Fixes

DLLs comiled with MSVC correctly link export symbols
When linking a DLL, "DLL:" is shown in output instead of "Exe:"
Linking a DLL with another DLL deduces the import library automatically
Ensure DLLs are not rebuilt unnecessarily

GCC/SNC/PS3 Fixes

Fix broken PS3/SNC compilation (was reading stderr instead of stdout)
Standardize GCC and MSVC compiler detection (allow with and without .exe extension)
Fix detection of GCC compiler in PS3 SDK
Fix detection of C vs C++ for GCC/SNC when using the cache

Correct errors not being double-clickable in VisualStudio in some situations due to thread numbering
Ensure active job count doesn't underflow when performing local jobs
Correct formatting of cache path to stdout in -verbose mode
Correct error message when attempting to append String to incompatible type
Don't spin @ 0% when failing the build
Save completion of items which are succesful even after the build as a whole has failed
-summary formatting is no longer reliant on tab width

Note

DB version has been increased; clean build will result after upgrading

Improvements

Allow {} to be used alone to create a local scope (like a function)
Config files (bff) can now include other config files, e.g. #include "file.bff"
Direct variable assignment/concatenation now supported for variables (.X = .Y)

Fixes

Unity generation parameter UnityInputExcludedFiles is no longer sensitive to slash type used
Stop tasks sometimes being started after build is aborted with Ctrl+C
Fix typographical error in command line usage output
Fix hang at startup if database file (.fdb) has been corrupted
Fix corrupt "Unknown argument" error message when passed bad cmd line arguments

Note

The cache is invalidated due to path/version changes (no old entries will be used)

Improvements

Cache performance and space usage improvements

Cache directory hierarchy is simplified to reduce IO
Cache contents are compressed, saving ~50% of disk space
Compression yields speedups on IO bound (local or network) builds

Handle transient file opening failures due to other applications opening our files (Antivirus etc)
Add "Copy" function which can copy a file during the build
Library and CSAssembly 'CompilerInputPath' can now accept a list of paths (or a single path as before)
Optimize node lookups to reduce CPU usage
Hide distributed task counts on progress bar when not in distributed mode

Fixes

Correct misleading error when unexpected character follows a variable operator (was displaying #1016, now displays new #1017)
Correctly handle comments in the middle of variable assignments (e.g. ".Var // comment" or ".Var = // comment")
Comments are correctly parsed inside {} scopes when starting at column 0
Add missing type safety checks on various CSAssembly and Library properties
Unity files are forced to be regenerated when "-clean" option is used
Build no longer gets stuck upon cache hit when running with "-j0"
Temp directory now correctly initialized when running with "-j0"

Note

The build database (fdb) version has changed, a clean build will forced on first use of this version

Improvements

Unity 'UnityInputPath' can now accept a list of paths (or a single path as before)

Fixes

Fix crash emitting a large errors to the TTY (>64KB)
Detect non-unique Unity, Executable and DLL nodes (emit Error #1100)
Handle Unity output paths that are not \ terminated

New

Config file now supports // style line comments as well as ; style
Add checks and errors (#1302, #1303) for bad precompiled header setup for cl.exe
Config markup helpers for VisualStudio and NotePad++

Improvements

Improve precision of timer used to track task durations

Fixes

All object and pch files are deleted before compilation to ensure rebuild/no old files left behind
Fix bad string output in "Unknown build target" message in x64
Compiler executable (MSVC & GCC) detection is no longer case sensitive
Removed detection of lower-case /z7 is as using Z7 debug format for cl.exe. (Z7 debug format arg is uppercase, and cl.exe compiler options are case sensitive)

The first public release of FASTBuild, with stable support for:

Optimal multi-threaded compilation
Build caching (network and/or local)
Unity/Blob generation
Unit Test Integration

Changelog