[GD-General] Compile times

[Noel L. <ll...@co...>]

We were talking about turnaround time of script languages vs. compiled
C++, and Brian Hook wrote:

> For what it's worth, when I worked on Quake 2 and Quake 3, complete 
> build times were on the order of a minute IIRC, and compile-edit-run 
> was measured in seconds.  I don't think anything magical was done for 
> that either -- it was straight ANSI C with the subsystems broken apart 
> into DLLs to avoid interdependencies.

I'm totally impressed. When you say complete build times, that means
*all* the code involved in Quake 2 or Quake 3? All the DLLs, everything?
Was there some trick you were using to get such incredible build times 
(other than using straight C)?

We're using C++ and STL, and even though we have a good physical
organization (like Lakos described), compiling all our libraries and
game code for one platform could take up to 15-20 minutes. That's only
for a full build; a quick change somewhere still requires building that
file and then doing a link, which is about 30-40 seconds. 

I find 30-40 seconds for a trivial change close to unbearable.
Especially when it takes another 10 seconds for the game to start and
another 10 seconds for the level to load.

What are other people doing to reduce their compile times? Getting rid
of STL is not really an option. It's way too useful to replace it with a
crippled, custom container/algorithm set that is probably not even type
safe. But any tricks that reduce how many times the same templates get
evaluated to save time would be welcome.


--Noel
ll...@co...