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Comment by euos | Hacker News Reader

I am ex-core contributor Chromium and Node.js and current core contributor to gRPC Core/C++.

I am never bothered with build times. There is "interactive build" (incremental builds I use to rerun related unit tests as I work on code) and non-interactive build (one I launch and go get coffee/read email). I have never seen hardware refresh toggle non-interactive into interactive.

My personal hardware (that I use now and then to do some quick fix/code review) is 5+ year old Intel i7 with 16Gb of memory (had to add 16Gb when realized linking Node.js in WSL requires more memory).

My work laptop is Intel MacBook Pro with a touch bar. I do not think it has any impact on my productivity. What matters is the screen size and quality (e.g. resolution, contrast and sharpness) and storage speed. Build system (e.g. speed of incremental builds and support for distributed builds) has more impact than any CPU advances. I use Bazel for my personal projects.

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Somehow programmers have come to accept that a minuscule change in a single function that only result in a few bytes changing in a binary takes forever to compile and link. Compilation and linking should be basically instantaneous. So fast that you don't even realize there is a compilation step at all.

Sure, release builds with whole program optimization and other fancy compiler techniques can take longer. That's fine. But the regular compile/debug/test loop can still be instant. For legacy reasons compilation in systems languages is unbelievably slow but it doesn't have to be this way.

This is the reason why I often use tcc compiler for my edit/compile/hotreload cycle, it is about 8x faster than gcc with -O0 and 20x faster than gcc with -O2.

With tcc the initial compilation of hostapd it takes about 0.7 seconds and incremental builds are roughly 50 milliseconds.

The only problem is that tcc's diagnostics aren't the best and sometimes there are mild compatibility issues (usually it is enough to tweak CFLAGS or add some macro definition)

I mean yeah I've come to accept it because I don't know any different. If you can share some examples of large-scale projects that you can compile to test locally near-instantly - or how we might change existing projects/languages to allow for this - then you will have my attention instead of skepticism.

That’s why I write test first. I don’t want to build everything.

I am firmly in test-driven development camp. My test cases build and run interactively. I rarely need to do a full build. CI will make sure I didn’t break anything unexpected.

I too come from Blaze and tried to use Bazel for my personal project which involves backend + frontend dockerized, the build rules got weird and niche real quick and I was spending lots of time working with the BUILD files making me question the value against plain old Makefiles, this was 3 years ago, maybe the public ecosystem is better now.

I use Basel for C++. I would write normal dockerfile if I need it. Bazel docker support is an atrocity. For JS builds I also use regular TSC.

rules_docker is now deprecated but rules_oci[0] is the replacement and so far I find it much nicer

[0] - https://github.com/bazel-contrib/rules_oci

You may pry my Dockerfiles from my cold dead fingers :)

Aren’t M series screen and storage speed significantly superior to your Intel MBP? I transitioned from an Intel MBP to M1 for work and the screen was significantly superior (not sure about storage speed, our builds are all on a remote dev machine that is stacked).

I only use laptop screen in emergencies. Storage is fast enough.

For my curiosity, what do you use for your main monitor? I’ve been wanting to replace my ultrawide with something better.

I use 4k 32' as my monitor. My home monitor is Dell U3219Q, I am very happy with picture quality, though kids say it is bad for gaming.

This is because you’ve been spoiled by Bazel. As was I.

One day I will learn cmake. But not today :)

Chromium is a massive project. In more normally-sized projects, you can build everything on your laptop in reasonable time.

When I worked at Chromium there were two major mitigations:

1. Debug compilation was split in shared libraries so only a couple of them has to be rebuilt in your regular dev workflow. 2. They had some magical distributed build that "just worked" for me. I never had to dive into the details.

I was working on DevTools so in many cases my changes would touch both browser and renderer. Unit testing was helpful.

Bazel is significantly faster on m1 compared to i7 even if it doesn’t try to recompile protobuf compiler code which it’s still attempting to do regularly

5+ year old i7 are potato and would be a massive time waster today. Build times matter.

I have a seven year old ThreadRipper Pro and would not significantly benefit from upgrading.

The Threadripper PRO branding was only introduced 3.5 years ago. The first two generations didn't have any split between workstation parts and enthusiast consumer parts. You must have a first-generation Threadripper, which means it's somewhere between 8 and 16 CPU cores.

If you would not significantly benefit from upgrading, it's only because you already have more CPU performance than you need. Today's CPUs are significantly better than first-generation Zen in performance per clock and raw clock speed, and mainstream consumer desktop platforms can now match the top first-generation Threadripper in CPU core count and total DRAM bandwidth (and soon, DRAM capacity). There's no performance or power metric by which a Threadripper 1950X (not quite 6.5 years old) beats a Ryzen 7950X. And the 7950X also comes in a mobile package that only sacrifices a bit of performance (to fit into fairly chunky "laptops").

I guess I should clarify: I am a rust and C++ developer blocked on compilation time, but even then, I am not able to justify the cost of upgrading from a 1950X/128GB DDR4 (good guess!) to the 7950X or 3D. It would be faster, but not in a way that would translate to $$$ directly. (Not to mention the inflation in TRx costs since AMD stopped playing catch-up.) performance-per-watt isn’t interesting to me (except for thermals but Noctua has me covered) because I pay real-time costs and it’s not a build farm.

If I had 100% CPU consumption around the clock, I would upgrade in a heart beat. But I’m working interactively in spurts between hitting CPU walls and the spurts don’t justify the upgrade.

If I were to upgrade it would be for the sake of non-work CPU video encoding or to get PCIe 5.0 for faster model loading to GPU VRAM.

sTR4 workstations are hard to put down! I'll replace mine one day, probably with whatever ASRock Rack Epyc succeeds the ROMED8-2T with PCIe 5.0.

In the meantime, I wanted something more portable, so I put a 13700K and RTX 3090 in a Lian Li A4-H2O case with an eDP side panel for a nice mITX build. It only needs one cable for power, and it's as great for VR as it is a headless host.

I don’t notice myself sitting and waiting for a build. I don’t want to waste my time setting up a new workstation so why bother?

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