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by gringomorcego 5141 days ago
Okay, semi-related:

Why is the speed of the Go compiler so important? Why not just use an incremental compiler? Why the hell would you want to recompile a 100k+ line program when there are known better alternatives?

Just doesn't make sense to me.
5 comments
pcwalton 5141 days ago
When your compiler is doing interprocedural optimizations like inlining (which Go's does), then changing an upstream dependency generally requires that all downstream dependencies be recompiled as well. So incremental recompilation isn't a panacea, and I think the Go designers made the right choice in striving to make compilation fast.

Of course, you can do something like incremental compilation only at -O0 with no inlining, which is what I suspect we'll end up doing in Rust (the relevant bug is [1]).

[1]: https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/2369

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rbright 5141 days ago
"The Go compiler isn't so fast; other compilers are just slow. Machines are bloody fast. Just don't piss the speed away." -Rob Pike http://twitter.com/rob_pike/status/199620997459087360

Why not do both? I appreciate that Go respects my time.

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enneff 5141 days ago
When we launched Go we made a big deal about compilation time because we were trying to appeal to C++ programmers. In large C++ projects it is not unusual to wait tens of minutes or even hours for projects to build. Today, the largest Go projects take mere seconds to build.

It turns out that way more than the C++ set were interested in Go. Naturally, people familiar with environments where compilation speed is a non-issue were mystified by our enthusiasm for Go's low compilation times.

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zoul 5141 days ago
As already pointed out by others, incremental compilation does not work all the time. And as proved by Git, some speed advancements really change the game.
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ibotty 5141 days ago
incremental compilation is not foolproof either. but the q is, whether compilation speed even matters. your typical c project will spend much time in make (semi-related (to the topic and make): use redo). and if you compile with -O0 your compiler will not be the bottleneck for most things.

go seems to be nice, but compilation speed is no real argument!

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