[josephg]

> Not when building large software projects.

While working in rust I am most limited by single core performance. Incremental builds at the moment are like, 300ms compiling and 2 seconds linking. In release mode linking takes 10+ seconds with LTO turned on. The linker is entirely single threaded.

Fast cold compiles are nice, but I do that far more rarely than incremental debug builds. And there’s faster linkers (like mold[1] or lld) but lld doesn’t support macos properly and mold doesn’t support macos at all.

I’m pretty sure tsc and most javascript bundlers are also single threaded.

I wish software people cared anywhere near as much about performance as hardware engineers do. Until then, single core performance numbers will continue to matter for me.

[1] https://github.com/rui314/mold

[PaulDavisThe1st]

My project [0] is about 600k lines of C++. It takes about 5m40s to build from scratch on a Ryzen Threadripper 2950X, using all 16 cores more or less maxed out. There's no option in C++ for meaningiful incremental compiles. Typically working compiles (i.e. just what is needed given whatever I've just done) are on the order of 5-45 secs, but I've noticed that knowing I can do a full rebuild in a few minutes affects my development decisions in a very positive way. I do 99% of my development work on Linux, even though the program is cross-platform, and so I get to benefit from lld(1).

The same machine does nychthemeral builds that include macOS compiles on a QEMU VM, but given that I'm asleep when that happens, I only care that the night's work is done before I get up.

[0] https://ardour.org/