Not bashing at all (you are somewhat in a better place than my own organization) but a point could be made that you could break the code down into subprojects and manage dependencies.
I've been on projects that did this - just linking everything back together if you touch a widely used subproject can blow that 10 minute budget too, for a single build flavor. When porting things for game development, I routinely have 30+ build flavors (say, 5 platforms, 6 configs per), and want to test at least a few of them to have even a remote chance of the checkin going green when touching core platform abstractions or config-specific stuff.
A lot can be done to reduce your typical or average build times (make everything data driven so you don't even have to rebuild the code!), but C++ makes it very hard to keep your worst-case build times in check. And I tend to be one of the guys tweaking and fixing things that invoke those worst-case build times. A simple example: Annotating logging macros to catch printf-style format string errors at build time instead of crashing at runtime if you're lucky.
Properly testing involves rebuilding most source files, on at least 3 build flavors to test against MSVC, Clang, and GCC...
I'd enjoy working on this :) It looks like a nice application of true build pipelines using GoCD. If you're interested to discuss this offline, do let me know.
Indeed it could, and you're looking at the result, down from 2.5h-ish when I arrived. Our pipeline runneth deep ... (Though of course we'll never stop whittling!)
A lot can be done to reduce your typical or average build times (make everything data driven so you don't even have to rebuild the code!), but C++ makes it very hard to keep your worst-case build times in check. And I tend to be one of the guys tweaking and fixing things that invoke those worst-case build times. A simple example: Annotating logging macros to catch printf-style format string errors at build time instead of crashing at runtime if you're lucky.
Properly testing involves rebuilding most source files, on at least 3 build flavors to test against MSVC, Clang, and GCC...