Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

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I was surprised at how amazed people on one of the recent Go threads was with Go compilation speeds, given that gcc delivers similar compilation speeds for C code per line of code for me on my old, slow home server.

As for 16 bit systems, I'd love to see a comparison with the Turbo Pascal compiler, for example, on modern hardware. Maybe my memory is deceiving me and the program sizes just weren't comparable, but it sure did seem like it was just flying on a 4.77MHz 8086 based PC. It'd be an interesting comparison.

Especially given I remember how frustrated I was with a lot of other contemporary compilers (whether for C, Pascal, dBase or others). The only other compiler I remember fondly for being fast was the AmigaE compiler (by Wouter van Oortsmerssen, the strlen.com / Cube engine guy, who I see is now working at Google on Android gaming - nothing but good can possibly come of that)

Is this true?

I'm not sure about C, but it's definitely the case that Go compiles magnitudes faster than C++, for any reasonable sized project. For example, the ~200k lines of Go standard library compiles in about 14 seconds on my workstation, while random C++ libraries frequently take much longer (just my anecdotal impression from waiting on "brew install").

C++ compiles pretty slow due to templates being in the header files, and the need to re-parse them in every compilation unit.

Also the language is quite complex and requires multiple analyses at parse time to decide what the developer is really trying to do.

C code can be compiled fast if not many optimizations are being made. For example the Tiny C compiler was compiling the Linux kernel around 15s in 2004, not sure about which modules were configured though.

Any proper compiler for a language with modules should anyway be able to beat C and C++ compilers hands down.

The slowness of C++ compilation is more complicated than you imply. Walter Bright details the causes here: http://www.drdobbs.com/228701711

I know, but that is why Walter's information is an article and not a plain simple post. There is too much compiler related information to discuss.

That was also my experience with Turbo Pascal, having used all MS-DOS versions and the 1.5 Windows version.

Other languages with module systems also compile quite fast.

It would be interesting to see a table of compilation speed comparisons of compilers for languages with module systems for applications of an considerable size.

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