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Comment by the_svd_doctor | Hacker News Reader

C++ (especially template heavy with lots of headers and so on) is certainly not fast to compile. But 2 hours that's crazy. What sort of codebase and on what kind of machine?

A 128 cores threadripper is a great workstation to compile C++ code fast :D

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For reference Unreal Engine 5 full build (building a lot of stuff you don't need) takes like 30 minutes on a 3950x. Typical incremental build is either 15 seconds, or a minute if I touch some popular header. For full build not only you can have a lot more cores, you can use IncrediBuild.

In my experience, a large Unreal Game can take as long as the engine on top of it. My current project is about 2 minutes of project code plus 15 minutes of engine code but my last project was more project code than engine code.

Unreal engine games, on a 3990x Threadripper with 128GB ram and NVMe SSD drives.

Chromium is known for taking hours.

That is true. But Chromium is not in the realm in which the compiled vs. interpreted debate is relevant. It is slow to compile, but it would also be very slow to run if it was written in Python.

(Unless a hypothetical Node.js rewrite would be comparable on speed. I wonder how it would do on memory.)

More like an hour or less on reasonable, consumer hardware[1]. A lot less on workstation/server CPUs, or with IncrediBuild.

[1] https://youtu.be/nRaJXZMOMPU?t=770

I am on Gentoo so I have some build time stats!

My system has a 3900x, 32GB ram, and a fast NVME SSD for reference.

The last chromium build took 1h:45m to complete. This build had LTO enabled and -j18 passed to ninja.

Without LTO it would probably be closer to an hour I think but I don't seem to have a non-LTO build in the logs.

Your estimation seems pretty accurate!

Most people will use ccache under Unixen.

And for those of us who work primarily with MSVC?

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