D needs to publicize its speed of compilation

I Love Stuffing ilovestuffing at gmail.com
Fri Dec 29 22:37:56 UTC 2017


On Friday, 22 December 2017 at 10:06:18 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> This one of the main strengths of D, it is what Walter focuses 
> on, yet I have seen almost nothing on the D blog talking about 
> this.  What brought me to emphasize this today is this recent 
> post about how long it takes to compile the mostly-C++ Chromium 
> web browser and the reddit discussion about it:
>
> https://lobste.rs/s/iri1te/chromium_has_compilation_time_problem
> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7ktzog/chromium_has_a_compilation_time_problem/
>
> I'm tempted to call BS on that 6-7 hour build time, as I used 
> to contribute to the Chromium project, and I think it used to 
> take me 20 minutes for a release build in a FreeBSD jail on a 
> fairly weak, 2008-vintage mini-desktop, a dual-core Celeron 
> with 2 GBs of RAM (don't hold me to that build time, just a 
> vague recollection, but probably in the ballpark).  Of course, 
> the last time I built Chromium was more than 5 years ago, and a 
> lot has likely changed since then, such as now using LTO to 
> speed up the browser apparently, and maybe the 
> cross-compilation toolchain for ARM is slower, though others 
> note similar times for native x64 compilation also.
>
> That still implies a slowdown of 2-3 orders of magnitude over 
> the last 5 years, given the much more powerful hardware he's 
> using, which is nuts.
>
> D really needs the community to write blog posts talking about 
> how fast it is, publicizing that there is an alternative to 
> these glacial build times: who wants to do this?  It doesn't 
> need to be on the D blog, could just be on your personal blog, 
> but it is a message that really needs to be spread.

To be fair, you are basing this off C++. C++ has an obnoxiously 
slow build system at times and everyone knows this, have known 
this, and have even addressed some parts of it. Yet they still 
use it. I don't think build times are that big of a deal. It's a 
nice to have, but as long as a fairly sizable project compiles in 
a less than a minute, you won't stand out in a bad way. If 
anything, D should leverage the fast compile times to take 
advantage of the leeway it gives so the compiler can do a bit of 
extra work to give better error messages.


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