[tom_]

You might need to specify --profiling-output= as well. I get an error fdrom cmake 3.31 if only the format is provided: CMake Error: --profiling-format specified but no --profiling-output!

Anyway, it looks like it only profiles the configure/generate steps. Not much use on Linux, but on Windows/macOS, perhaps. Due to lack of any standard package manager, it's a good idea to build every dependency from source on those OSs, and the time can mounts up.

My project is not that large, but it takes 1 minute to configure from scratch on Windows, and 10 minutes (!) on macOS.

[Night_Thastus]

I specified both. In any case, yeah, cmake time isn't useful in my case.

Bizarre that you see 10 minutes on MacOS. Something's definitely busted there. It's not even that bad for me on Windows, and that's saying something.

[tom_]

For the record: the cmake profiling data did help a bit. On macOS it seems that the configure stage does 200+ try_compiles, largely due to SDL2, and each one somehow takes ~2.3 seconds. So that's 460 seconds right there. And regarding the total time, it's actually more like 480 seconds. (I must have misremembered! Or perhaps my laptop is measurably faster when its integrated GPU isn't driving 2 external displays.)

On Windows: 50 try_compiles, about half and half SDL2 and libuv, and each one takes ~1 second.

I don't think either of these try_compile turnaround times is acceptable (what is it doing?! I bet it's like 50 ms on Linux) but the total figure does now feel a bit less mysterious.

[wakawaka28]

You might also like my suggestions in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44931551