[drainyard]

I used to agree with this, but having spent a while in a very good C++ project (by C++ standards), even if we try to always forward declare and not include any unnecessary headers in headers, we still have a clean debug build time of 30-40 minutes. Even changing a single line in a cpp file, will still take around 30-40 seconds at best with incremental builds. I think long compile times are in the eye of the beholder, but often it feels like people have just gotten used to unnecessarily long compile times because they've forgotten how fast computers are and how fast a compiler should be for most of the work except for maybe some of the more complex optimizations in -O3. It kills productivity, and should really be a much larger focus than it sometimes seems to be.

[hohenheim]

Well said, I could not have said it better. Just to add, the productivity boost you get from short build times, in a long run, think of a project you work on for years, will out perform ANY gain you get from using a library, templates, and the like that kills your build time.

[magicalhippo]

We use Delphi at work, just did a full rebuild of our core product, 978015 LOC compiled and linked in 22 seconds on my aging i7 4790k.

[jbverschoor]

If it’s just a single line at a leaf in the deptree, it should only be taking time to link everything together.

Still, long compile cycles are my kryptonite... 0 productivity. Horrible. Back when I was doing java, I patched hibernate to serialize and deserialize the generated code, so startuptimes would be lowered with about 80%.

My setup back then used hot code replacement, but so many people would just simply wait 1-3minutes for every single change...