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Comment by crafn | Hacker News Reader

Compile times are not a problem in small codebases. Try to compile a 100kloc codebase using templates generously. Even your link times will easily grow over 10 seconds. Maybe even a minute. And 100kloc is still a pretty small codebase in terms of AAA development.

It's true that complexity somewhat depends on the context. Complexity of a language is a useful metric when talking about mental overhead of the programmer (which translates to productivity), and when writing custom tools for the language, both of which are relevant when developing a game engine. Safety has traditionally been a quite small priority in gamedev. I assumed this was the context.

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So how much faster is C over C++ compilation on a AAA game codebase, can you tell me?

I, personally, cannot since I've never seen a AAA game in C. However, I've never seen a AAA game compiling under 10 seconds. Or under a minute. Just linking with a console SDK libs is about a minute if you have a fast machine.

Yes. your link times will grow. But link times are not depended on choice of language. It depends on how big your set of object files is. Depending on your platform you can optimize your build.

I.e. - use dynamic link libraries

- use create static libraries

- carefully manage your dependencies. i.e. only include what you actually need.

- hot reload game logic (where quick iteration is more important)

- compile cache.

- ssd disk

- fast processor

- and yes, agreed. 100kloc is still small.

There's a lot of tricks you can do to optimize build times, and I've tried most of them in my previous game engine. Got ~90kloc recompilation time from 15min to something like a few minutes, although that required rewriting a bunch of code to not use templates. And removing boost. Multiple days' work.

But the point is, that I'd like a language that is fast to compile by default. C seems pretty promising, as doing a full unity build of my 25kloc codebase takes something like 3 seconds. Not sure how much of that is actually compilation, and how much IO. I'm expecting the project to grow to something like 100-200kloc, and hopefully never have to spend time figuring out why the compilation takes too long, and instead use that time to do something productive.

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