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Comment by rubymaverick | Hacker News Reader

Sorry for the slow response times on the challenge submissions everyone. We only have so many Mac Minis running these things . We are looking into ways to speed it up

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Have you considered ccache?

http://ccache.samba.org/

You could also roll your own in a very few lines of code. Maybe even have the output of the program, not the compiled code, be the content of the hashed file, assuming you aren't reading STDIN or anything like that from the user.

That's a really cool project! Definitely going to look into it for some of our more complicated courses, but for this course compilation is usually under a half-second so it's not the compilation that's slow (it's the way we are tearing down an entire VM after every submission, we are working on changing that now)

Ah. Maybe consider a FreeBSD jail with a union mounted filesystem if you can get away with using a non-Apple (GNUstep/GCC?) toolchain. The teardown on a jail is as fast as the chroot syscall. ;-)

Or even better, use ZFS snapshots as your sandbox. Copy on write kicks butt. See: http://vocalbit.com/article/402/freebsd-jails-using-zfs-and-...

Just one nitpick for an excellent comment. GNUstep/Clang would be the only way to get support for array, dictionary and number literals, as well as ARC.

GNUstep/GCC is possible, but you lose support for all of the above, blocks, and several other recent additions to the Objective-C language.

Very true. We really leaned heavily on the new literals and ARC in this course.

Looks like those Mac Minis are getting smoked right now, poor little guys. I can't load the page unfortunately to see myself, but could you use GNUStep to compile the examples on any flavour of box?

I know I feel so bad for them. We are working on some temporary fixes (including caching which as we all know is really easy to do) and changing the way we isolate the code submissions so we can get more throughput. GNUStep might be an interesting long term fix.

In challenge # 22 in level 4, I am getting an error :‘extern’ variable has an initializer; I have tried the running the show answer solution but to no avail.

FWIW, Git Real 2 is working nicely at my place. I'm at level 2 now, looks great so far!

Could you use GNU Objective-C on Linux VMs, e.g. on AWS or something?

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