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Comment by nojvek | Hacker News Reader

I am a huge believer of <10s Dev loop. I quit my previous team because compile times were greater than 2mins and I wasn't in a position to influence making it shorter.

In my new team I got it from 30s to 5s and the effects have been amazing. I have to thank VScode and Gulp to make this possible. With typescript vscode does fast parsing of your code on every keystroke and gives squigglys instantly. On every save, gulp does its magic and vscode runs the problem matcher and shows more squiggly on my editor.

The browser knows when a file has changed and refreshes immediately. Vscode has a chrome-debug plugin so my breakpoints hit immediately in the IDE.

It's been an amazing experience so far. We've also revved up our CI systems to run 1000's of tests in parallel.

You actually enjoy work when you don't spend forever waiting for things to compile.

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> In my new team I got it from 30s to 5s and the effects have been amazing.

I was proud of being part of the team that got the compile time for the core of our product from about 2 hours down to about 30 minutes (the same amount of code, loaded into a RAMdisk and built on a 16-core machine builds in about 2-3 minutes today, but most of our full builds take from 20 minutes to 2 hours now).

After you build the core, a fairly simple plug-in on a reasonable development machine will compile+link in about 5 seconds, maybe. How long it takes to test the fix depends on how far into the program's operation a failure is expected to occur...anywhere from a couple seconds in, if it can't contact the server, to an unbounded length of time, if there's a rare bug triggered by some weird pattern in the customer's data or use of the system.

I enjoy hearing about what other people expect from their dev environments. I've worked almost exclusively in large C++ systems.

This is a problem I'm having at the moment, 20s webpack builds with ts-loader, plus other build steps running in VS 2015. Seems I need to drop ts-loader, and build more directly. Are your build files available to look at somewhere?

That sounds... high. No guarantees that I can help with your current stack, but my email is in my profile if you'd like to run your setup by me.

Do you run webpack on Windows? It's much slower there than on *nix platforms

Web engineers are waiting for stuff to compile these days? I thought things were supposed to be moving forward, not backward.

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No it doesn't.

It's a two steps forward two steps back kind of situation. For a while we just had HTML+PHP... save it, alt tab, reload. Then we had servers that have to boot and that took a step back. Then we had hot reloading servers and everything is fast again. Then we added asset complication and things took 30 seconds to process again. Now we're working on incremental building of assets to get back that speed again.

It's simultaneously frustrating and entertaining to watch the younger generation toil under the impression that they're inventing something new.

There's always been a segment of web engineers who have had to wait for stuff to compile. That's not a bad thing, in and of itself. It's the really long compile times due to bad tooling that sucks. Those are avoidable, though.

Moving from Grunt to Broccoli helped a lot. 30 sec went down to a few hundreds of milisec. Broccoli is just insane.

Interesting. I may have to give that setup another shot. I found TypeScript compilation to be really slow. Was recently amazed by Bucklescript's lightning-fast compile times and killer repl, but its integration with the JavaScript ecosystem was nowhere near as smooth.

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