compile_commands.json is large! Could we make it smaller?

[cpsauer]

Sure is. [It's ~260MB on the main Hedron repo.]

Why? It contains a description of all the ways how every file is compiled, including headers included in lots of compilations. We're hoping that, at least temporarily, you can spare the disk space.

Need it smaller? There are things we can do but we intentionally haven't because we anticipate that this problem will be temporary. The easiest thing would be to modify refresh.template.py to only output the first entry per file. Since clangd currently chooses just one command per file anyway, this shouldn't hurt usability. We haven't done this already because clangd will hopefully not need compile commands for headers in the future, and will hopefully take advantage multiple compile commands per file. The size without headers is only a couple MB, and without duplicate files, 16MB.

[cpsauer]

If we need to do more, we could omit headers whose unambiguously-closest source file uses the same command. Clangd will already infer those correctly.