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Comment by tkuraku | Hacker News Reader

Visual studio is a pretty nice development environment. However, when compiling c++ software it routinely takes much longer than compiling with make on Linux on the same hardware (dual boot). Close to 10x longer! This is with cross-platform cmake projects. Anyone else experience this?

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Are you running an antimalware program with real-time scanning enabled on Windows? I've found that typically causes a lot of the slowdowns on builds if you don't have your worktree excluded from it. Linux still ends up faster for me even without the anti-malware on Windows but its not as dramatic.

There is the normal windows defender active, but unfortunately I don't have the permissions to turn it off or set exclusions.

Are you a developer who doesn't have admin rights on his machine? How does that happen?

It is possible to have admin access, but still be locked out of certain things via group policy.

There may be other anti-malware, file encryption, etc installed without your knowledge or visibility.

Just speculation here, but I suspect the time to compile has little to do with the complier, but rather the way Visual Studio is architeched. There are layers-on-layers of half-assed fuctionality build on top of everything in VS.

While you might want to just compile a release version your program, Microsoft has other priorities. Initialize profilers, networking subsystems, debugging support, check the internet for whatever-the-fuck, check drivespace on drives you're not using, see if bill gates' dead grandma's cookies have been delivered...

Just speculation here

Exactly, and not really correct. Building on the commandline, no VS used at all, still has the same problem. It's really just the compilation istelf which is the main factor.

Yes, I have the same experience. Using the same version of clang to build the same software on the same computer / same SSD than Linux is muuuuch slower on Windows - win32 is just incredibly slow and has not kept up with the times, especially for filesystems and scheduling

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