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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