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by oelmekki
3506 days ago
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Before golang, my experience with compilation was about building softwares as an user in gentoo, and a few LFS. Speed of compilation was the first thing that stroke me with golang. But then again, it was the first time I was actually writing code to be compiled. Is it that usual C/C++ opensource projects are very big, or am I correct to assume golang compiler processing go code is indeed really faster than gcc processing C/C++ ? |
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Historically this was always seen as a good tradeoff. You only compile once, but code runs thousands of times or more. Therefore a large slowdown in compilation is seen as a good tradeoff for better runtime speed.
Go follows the turbo pascal type compilers in that
1) the language is limited in several ways to make compilation faster (e.g. it is given as an argument against generics)
2) the compiler just doesn't try a whole range of optimizations
Unfortunately this is not really what you're seeing. What you're seeing in this case is a massive difference in the size of the projects you're compiling.
Go has been written with the explicit purpose of making writing large programs somewhere between tedious and impossible. By contrast, many C/C++ programs are huge. Tens to hundreds of megabytes of source code, and when compiling Gentoo, I bet you're compiling more than a gigabyte total.