RE: [GD-General] Compile times

[Tom N. <t.n...@vr...>]

Hi,

In the scripting thread, Brian mentioned "faster development" (i.e. no
rebuilds) as one of the reasons one might use scripting. Would anyone
actually go so far as to implement a scripting engine just for this
purpose? Or, to take it one step further, would you consider writing
your application in a different language altogether (not C/C++), just
for the sake of improving programmer productivity?

The reason I ask is because Brian brought up the build times for Quake
2. Our current project is probably roughly the same size as Q2 (110K
lines of code), and takes just under 5 minutes to rebuild. Quake 2 took
40 seconds to build on the same machine -- something I can only dream
of. But! You may not have heard about this, but a bunch of guys have
taken it upon themselves to translate the entire Quake 2 source code to
Delphi/Object Pascal (see
http://sourceforge.net/projects/quake2delphi/). They have > 150K lines
of code, and it builds in less than 3 seconds -- so fast that my watch
isn't really accurate enough to time it.

If it is indeed a fact that using STL in a C++ project would badly
increase compile times, then this might be seen by some as a valid
argument against the use of STL. By the same logic, if you knew that you
could get your work done faster using another programming language,
would you do it? _Has_ anyone actually done it (e.g. even if only for
internal tools)? I'd love to hear about the build times for large(-ish)
Java or C# projects, for example.

-- Tom