[GD-General] RE: Compile times

[Iain R. <i.n...@re...>]

For what it's worth, my experience shows a marked difference between VC6
and Borland C++ Builder (3 and 4). I'm using BCB, and my complete
rebuild time (on a lowly P2-333, 128MB) is approx 1 minute. It's not a
large project though - approx 70 .c files, all straight C.

However, I did get the opportunity to build it with VC6, and it took
approx 10 minutes! Now, I had my header files optimised for BCB (article
at http://www.bcbdev.com/articles/pch.htm) and it's not hugely pretty,
but it's good for rebuilds, capitalising on cached pch files. After BCB
has created its pch, it literally flies through the source files (maybe
4 a second). I didn't manage to configure VC to rebuild this fast. But
what it shows is that it pays to get to know your compiler, and find out
how to optimise your code for it. And you shouldn't have to put up with
slow compile times. BCB tells you how many lines are being compiled.
Even a small source file can cause the compiler to look at over 200,000
lines of code in headers...

Iain