[toolslive]

This is yet another problem caused by the fact compilers have a 'file in, file out' interface. (the other problem is performance of the compilation/linking/packaging process). There's simply no reason why input to a compiler should be a file, and no reason why the result should be one.

[jmnicolas]

Can you give some examples of what we could pass to a compiler that is not a file ?

[dgellow]

Could you be more explicit? What do you want instead of a file?

[toolslive]

Suppose the IDE has the code in memory, it wants it compiled (or syntax checked, or ...). Currently, it needs to write out a file, then call the compiler, and pick up the result from the file system, and parse the result. Ideal, would be a programmer's API to do this. But a compilation service, with RPC calls would already be a major improvement.

Also, if you store code, intermediate results, dependencies, ..., in a database (could even be in memory), you can reuse these intermediate results. The dependency graph can guide you to decide what needs to be changed etc.

[im_down_w_otp]

I'm not seeing the problem. You can already pipe inputs to the compiler, and those inputs don't have to be from a file on-disk, they can just be fed over stdin. Several compilers, including GCC, support using in-memory only movement of interstitial data between compilation phases instead of using intermediate temp files.