Have you tried the mold [1] linker? It's a drop-in replacement with a single cargo config change and gave me a massive speed-up (> 10x) for incremental debug builds of a large project with around 450 dependencies.
Sure, Rust compiles slower, but in C++ I have to wait on a slow compile just to find something dumb like a typo. And it doesn't even have the borrow checker. I have to make an exe that doesn't work to see if I made one typo. And then the errors are so bad.
https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangCheck.html
you will need a Compilation Database (CDB) in a compile_commands.json file. I know CMake knows how to generate one, but the fact that other build systems don't shows how fragmented and user- unfriendly the cpp ecosystem is.
Maybe I'm setting the bar too high for an old technology? I don't know.
What IDE (or just DE) would you recommend that works well?
I'm not on my work machine now. I don't write C++ as much at my company anymore, as I was pushed into a more (regrettably), so I can't recall an example from the top of my head now. But there were definitely instances where you can pass in something, and it doesn't error until you hit the "build" button (or run a build via cli). And even then, the editor doesn't report where the error is in the "editor area", you have to read the file/line in the console.
We have a root project that's fully CMake, that orchestrates our sub libraries (also using CMake, declared with ExternalProject_Add) so the dependees are built before their dependents (and also to handle final packaging). The subprojects are added as git submodules.
I tried VSCode and QtCreator but none of them seem to support CMake multi-projects defined in this way. I have to create a build directory per subproject, which can be painful when we have so many subprojects.
well, those are not sub-libraries but external projects with their own build-system. I have sublibraries in submodules and add them with add_subdirectory and everything shows and is auto-completed correctly.