Study: build times for D programs

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Wed, 25 Jul 2012 17:31:10 -0400
Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:

> On 7/25/12 4:53 PM, Rainer Schuetze wrote:
> >
> > The "edit-compile-debug loop" is a use case where the D module
> > system does not shine so well. Compare build times when only
> > editing a single source file:
> > With the help of incremental linking, building a large C++ project
> > only takes seconds.
> > In contrast, the D project usually recompiles everything from
> > scratch with every little change.
> 
> The same dependency management techniques can be applied to large D 
> projects, as to large C++ projects. (And of course there are a few
> new ones.) What am I missing?
> 

Aren't there still issues with what object files DMD chooses to store
instantiated templates into? Or has that all been fixed?

The xfbuild developers wrestled a lot with this and AIUI eventually
gave up. The symptoms are that you'll eventually start getting linker
errors related to template instantiations, which will be
fixed when you then do a complete rebuild.