Programming Build Times?

[byteit101]

C++ has a interesting compiler model that saves tons of time on most builds. In a nutshell, it only builds the .cpp files that have changed, so if you have a million lines of code, and change one file, it only needs to recompile the one file (which produces a .o file), then joins all the .o files together, which is much faster than the .o file compilation. The result: a speedy build 90% of the time. Unless you mush lots and lots and lots of code into one file, C++ is fast at compiling changes. Do be aware that the compiler is smart and figures out if dependencies of a file change most of the time, but occasionally the compiler does not recompile something that it should (.h file changes usually), leaving two incompatible .o files. Rebuilding solves this issue (when we have errors, most of the time rebuilding solves it), and our code last year (which had quite a few largeish files) would rebuild completely in about 30 seconds, and a regular build of our main file took 10 seconds tops. C/C++ compiling is an interesting subject.