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It's interesting, but probably not that surprising, that the Linux port has faster buildtimes, given that building the Linux kernel is the primary metric that kernel developers are interested in, and one they try to improve constantly.

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I don't think you can take the merit away from the build system author so easily. As the article states and the manual mentions, a clever build system based on make, without using recursive Makefiles, took 10 seconds to start compiling after modifying a file, and the new build system takes less than one second, on the same Linux system. No doubt the OS has many things to say regarding process start time, filesystem access, etc. But the big differences come from the build system, entirely in the userspace side.

I think that he meant that the Linux tools were faster because the Linux kernel devs also use them and contribute back to those projects in an effort to improve their own build times. (i.e. if make was slowing down the kernel build times, then some kernel devs would either build something else or improve make)

That's absolutely true, and I do not want to take anything away from him.

I was trying to make the point that among the operating systems doing builds under his new system, Linux was compiling the fastest. I was suggesting an interesting possible explanation for that.

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