HACKER Q&A
📣 photawe

How much compile time is unbearable?


Clearly, language will be an issue here.

Curious what you guys think.

For me, in C#:

<2s - dream come true; 5s - niiice; 10s - acceptable; 10-15s - bad; 20+s - insanely bad;

I've moved away from C++ mainly because of compile times. While templates are insanely awesome, code using them ended up with insane compile times.

C#/Winforms - insanely fast compile times

C#/WPF - very fast compile times (5-10 seconds, in 50-100K LOC solutions)

C#/UWP - MS quality; compile times are in the minutes

  👤 burfog Accepted Answer ✓
From experience with a problematic build system, the compile time is unbearable when it exceeds the number of hours in a day. Each automated nightly build is started before the previous one has finished. This overloads the machine, making the builds take even longer. You have to switch to weekly builds.

It's not all bad. It trains you to think carefully, producing code that compiles correctly on the first try. You learn to write bug-free code.

👤 simonblack
What is unbearable is purely subjective.

If you're used to 2 seconds start to finish, then 2 minutes is horribly unbearable.

On the other hand, if you're used to 30-40 minutes (as was 'normal' for compiling a linux kernel on older machines back in the 90s or thereabouts) then 2 minutes is miraculously fast!

👤 gjvc
https://ccache.dev/