[defer]

I'm not familiar with fuschia but those times are what I'd consider normal for an initial compilation of an operating system in regular consumer workstations.

I work on the android operating system and very rarely compile the whole thing from scratch in development environments. Incremental builds plus adb sync (think rsync between compiled artifacts in host and device) make it into a manageable workflow.

Even incrementally, it takes a few minutes to see your changes and that can be a source of frustration for newcomers who are used to instant feedback. Being productive requires making good decisions on how often and what to compile as well as strategies for filling up compilation time.

[dalbasal]

The last sentence is an eyebrow raiser

[gambiting]

I work in videogames - making any change to code takes about 2-4 minutes to compile(huge C++ codebase with a billion templates, it actually takes about 40 minutes from scratch with distributed build, few hours without it), plus second that again for the game to start and test. And god forbid you made any changes to data - then it's about 20-30 minutes to binarize the data packs again and deploy them. Really makes you slow down and think any change through before trying it. The "pray and spray" approach to coding simply doesn't work here.

[catwell]

The compile times are part of the reason why scripting languages like Lua are popular in games. In engine code it's fine, but you don't want to wait minutes to see a change while working on higher-level parts of the game.

The data thing though, that sounds like your engine is poorly optimized for development time. There should be a way to work with data without repacking everything.

[moonchrome]

While I remember those days of C++ development - I never want to go back there. It's surprising people are willing to put up with this shit at this in this day and age. No wonder there's so much crunch time.

[pjmlp]

Even when I mostly do managed languages, I keep getting back to C++, why am I willing to put up with it?

It is the language those managed language runtimes are written on, the main language for GPGPU programming, two major compiler building frameworks, and works out of box in all OS SDKs while providing me a way not to deal with C flaws unless forced by third party libraries.

I could be spending my time creating libraries for other ecosystems, but I have better things to do with time.

[a9h74j]

I sometimes wonder if these sorts of observations provide some reason to make either embeddedable languages or NOT self-host a compiler for a new language, but continue to write the compiler in C or C++. This is a weak argument compared to self-hosting a language, but might be something to consider in passing.

[pjmlp]

Indeed, that is why many times a language isn't self hosted.

It wasn't because it was lacking in capabilities, rather the authors decided they would spend resources elsewhere.

Naturally it has the side effect to reinforce the use of the languages that are already being used.

[humanrebar]

C++ is fine. It's just nobody likes designing and writing lighter weight tests and simulations to keep local dev workflows productive.

For things like AAA games and OS development, I'm not convinced simply picking another language solves the problem. At least not while keeping all the same benefits. C builds faster, sure, but it doesn't have the same feature set.

[jcelerier]

I'm trying to ! https://youtu.be/fMQvsqTDm3k?t=86

I'm getting 150 ms of iteration time on small cases, 200-300 on average ones

[gambiting]

We do 0 crunch or overtime as a company policy, but yeah, it does slow down things a bit.

>>It's surprising people are willing to put up with this shit at this in this day and age

All major APIs, the SDKs for PS5/Xbox are all only provided in C++ so it's almost a necessity. Same reason why we all use Windows - the platform tools are only provided for windows.

[jcelerier]

How are you building your code ? Here's my iteration time when working on the main codebase I'm on, https://github.com/ossia/score which is very template-heavy, uses boost, C++20 and a metric ton of header-only libraries: first on some semi-heavy file and then on a simple one https://streamable.com/hfkbzg

[deaddodo]

I'm actually curious why they bother converting game data at all into binary formats, before production builds. The logic is all there to load the data and you already have the raw data local; I would assume it takes more logic to unpack it and would seem faster to just use the raw data.

[londons_explore]

The data before packing and the data after unpacking are probably not the same formats.

Some of the packing steps are also probably lossy (eg. Take this super high poly count model, and cut away 99% of the polygons). If you skip that culling step, the game probably won't run.

[gambiting]

Yes, that's exactly what it is. The "data" might be 8K textures, as part of the binarization it gets converted into a format that the client can understand, but also follows a "recipe" for the texture set throught the editor(so convert it a 2K texture with a specific colour spec). Same for models etc.

And yes, the client itself usually can't read the raw data, and even if it could there is not enough ram on consoles to load everything as-is. The workstations we use for development all have 128GB of ram just so you can load the map and all models in-editor.

[Kelteseth]

Have you tried ccache now that it has MSVC support?

[gambiting]

We use clang for all configurations and all platforms, and we use FastBuild(we also used to pay for Incredibuild but it wasn't actually any faster than FastBuild in our testing).

[defer]

Yeah, I mentioned it because I see peers doing different things to be productive during compilation times while newcomers will stare at compiler output. Some will jump to writing documentation, take care of issue management, work on some other ticket entirely, etc.

[spoiler]

I'm vastly oversimplifying the issue (also I'm not a doctor), but didn't studies show that this type of multitasking is bad for our mental health and increases the likelihood of burnout?

[simonh]

Not a doctor either, just going on articles I've read on this. The sort of multitasking that causes those problems is when both tasks need frequent attention. If you can essentially leave a task alone for several hours, with some sort of notification if there's a problem, that's fine. Even things that don't take much attention but are ongoing tasks, like doing the ironing, are fine depending what else you're combining it with.

[defer]

This resonates. I usually wrap my long running commands in something that sends a push notification when they finish so that I don't jump around seeing if things completed or failed. I find the distraction of the push notification less disrupting than continually checking for completeness.

[jfoutz]

osx comes with a command "say" which is a text to speech tool. I'd do things like make && say "build complete" || say "compile failed" with different voices I thought were funny. generally worked great.

One day, I stepped away and had a particularly intimidating voice say "your build has failed" and apparently knocked out my headphones. I came back just in time to hear that, and see a couple coworkers jump at the sound.

After that, I was much more consistent at disabling sound when I stepped away. I got a little teasing about that day, but generally it worked great.

[spoiler]

This is actually a great idea. I've used from-cli-notifications for things that I knew would take hours, but for coding related stuff I always think "it's not that long." So, I would immediately go into "active attention multi-tasking" and then recheck if the compilation tab finished, and then decide from there where to shift my active attention, without giving it some breathing room.

Lately I've actively tried not to do that (it's a hard habit to break, and I still feel guilt sometimes), though.

[spoiler]

This makes sense about moving your active attention to different object(ive)s. I think I slowly stopped doing "active" multitasking and switched to this low-attention multi-tasking once my burn-out got worse. FWIW: I don't think multi-tasking on its own caused the burn-out either, it was a combination of a few things probably.

[defer]

It's certainly possible, I honestly wouldn't know. Anedoctaly, I find it worse on my mental health to just sit around waiting for things to finish.

[jfoutz]

fast cycles are liberating, because it's easy to just ask the compiler or your testing harness if you're doing the right thing. I can't speak for the parent, but in my experience, typing isn't the hard part.

With slower cycles, I think more about how much to try before submitting work. Some times I feel comfortable pounding out quite a bit of code. Other times, I know there's some subtlety so I need to double check things. I don't want to stumble on forgetting a const declaration, or something silly like that. Iterations are slower, but you can spend time in flow thinking harder about each loop.

Although, sometimes, I do just stare at the console waiting for feedback. That's usually a good time to go to the bathroom and maybe grab a snack.

Not necessarily multitasking. Just being careful about what plates are spinning, and which I can set down or pick up between steps.

[zozbot234]

> fast cycles are liberating, because it's easy to just ask the compiler or your testing harness if you're doing the right

Type checking is still a very quick part of compile, so it can still support a "fast cycle" workflow if most simple errors are detected via incompatible types. You just need to go all-in on type-driven development, rather than simple reliance on unit tests.

[jfoutz]

ah, I alluded to that with "ask the compiler".

but yeah, types are great. Quickcheck is great too. But you'll have to pry my oracles from my cold dead hands. Computers show me over and over how stupid I am. Yeah, if I have a regression, I'm adding a specific test for that.

[ModernMech]

> newcomers will stare at compiler output.

I know at least for me, I sit in quiet contemplation and think while the project is compiling. I expect the context switch of going between writing docs and writing code on every compile would be too much for my brain. Is it managers making you feel like you need to be doing something else while your code is compiling? I guess I just never felt like I was being unproductive while my code was compiling.

[aaaaaaaaaaab]

I just browse HackerNews.