I'm just here because my compile times are slow. 3 hours later… after 12 tweets, reading 6 articles, filing a GitHub issue, and watching a show on Netflix… what was I building?
Judging from the compile times, Gentoo?
Too bad the Delphi team was not able to find a business model that was able to scale their user base (probably some kind of subscription at the price range of JetBrains subscription was needed). Now are now looking back into C++ (and its much longer compile times).
2. Finish other work.
3. If you iterate a lot, maybe just reading the code figuring out your next steps.
4. Maybe figure out why it's taking so long, and figure out a way to speed things up.
5. Write more tests.
Of course, if you're rebuilding the same code over and over it can be a net win, but -in the comments- it is mentioned that the obvious things -that one might end up doing somewhat frequently in C/C++ development- invalidate the cache.
John Lakos
The book explains how to design large systems to contain compile times.