One Build for Cloud and Device: Consolidating a 500k-Line C++ Engine

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:33:42 +0000

The legacy ASR engine, roughly 500k lines of C++, was built by its owners with GCC and plain CMake for the cloud. The on-device team consumed it as a library across about 7 ARM toolchains from the Android NDK plus 4 x86 gcc/clang variants, through a Conan-based build layer.
Before: on-device releases were hand-curated snapshots of the upstream engine, maintained in forks of every ASR package and re-merged periodically. Each release took days at minimum and often weeks, as toolchain-specific breakage surfaced and needed patches.
Fix: point all engine code at a single virtual build-system package. In the cloud dependency universe it resolves to bare CMake; in the device universe it resolves to the Conan layer, which drives the same CMake underneath. About 40 packages converted; one source tree builds for all 12 toolchains.
Kept it that way with a pre-merge analyzer that compiles every pull request against the device toolchains before it can land, so device compatibility is checked at merge time rather than discovered at release time.

Conan on jdcsen