When playing around with Cargo’s new timing visualization:
https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/exploring-crate-graph-build-times-with-cargo-build-ztimings/10975/21
… I was surprised to see the `script` crate’s build script take 76 seconds.
I did not expect WebIDL bindings generation to be *that* computationally
intensive.
It turns out almost all of this time is overhead. The build script uses CMake
to generate bindings for each WebIDL file in parallel, but that causes a lot
of work to be repeated 366 times:
* Starting up a Python VM
* Importing (parts of) the Python standard library
* Importing ~16k lines of our Python code
* Recompiling the latter to bytecode, since we used `python -B` to disable
writing `.pyc` file
* Deserializing with `cPickle` and recreating in memory the results
of parsing all WebIDL files
----
This commit remove the use of CMake and cPickle for the `script` crate.
Instead, all WebIDL bindings generation is done sequentially
in a single Python process. This takes 2 to 3 seconds.
