[lisper]

Yes, that's true. It has been O(1 hour) for pretty much the entire history of Linux. And if you think about it, this makes sense. If it were significantly less than that, the development cycle would speed up so it would be easier to add capabilities, which would slow down the build. If it were significantly longer, the addition of new features would slow down until the hardware started to catch up. So the compile time acts as a sort of natural control mechanism to throttle the addition of new features.

[cyphar]

I'm not sure that is the primary reason -- many other projects have had their compile times explode over many years, even though the same logic should apply.

Not to mention if you build the kernel regularly, you benefit from incremental compilation. If you change a few non-header files the rebuild time can be as little as 2-3 minutes. Oh, and "make localdefconfig" will reduce your from-scratch compile times to the 5-15 minute mark. I highly doubt most kernel devs are building a distro configuration when testing (especially since they'd be testing either in a VM or on their local machine).

[lisper]

> many other projects have had their compile times explode over many years

Like, for example?

[brantonb]

When I worked at Microsoft, Windows took far, far longer than an hour to build from scratch. I remember walking a few buildings over to the burn lab to pick up DVDs of the latest build. I don’t have any hard data, but running a full build on your dev box was very rarely done.

[lisper]

The dynamics of commercial projects can be very different from open-source. You're much more likely to tolerate sitting through long builds if you're being paid to do so.

[fest]

Until management notices, does the X hours saved multiplication by number of developers, and the resources for improvement will be found soon.

[cameronbrown]

Definitely not. People are far more expensive than machines.

[pretty_bubbles]

Was it just the windows kernel? Or did it include all of the utilities in Windows?

[lonelappde]

It's a lower bound for a highly active project.