D needs to publicize its speed of compilation

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, December 29, 2017 22:37:56 I Love Stuffing via Digitalmars-d 
wrote:
> 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.

So much about build times and how much they matter seems to be about
perception. For instance, I used to work at a company whose main project
took over 3 - 4 hours to do a clean build. After the project was redone in
Java, the build times were about 10 minutes, and folks complained about how
long they were even though they were worlds better than the C++ build times
had been.

It also depends on your personality. Personally, while I like builds being
near instantaneous when dealing with unit tests, if they take a few seconds,
it's not a big deal, but I know folks who get seriously annoyed if they can
notice much of a difference time-wise between hitting enter to run the build
command and hitting enter with no command. Either way though, having build
times be more than a few seconds when dealing with unit tests tends to cause
serious problems even though having a build for an entire project take a few
minutes usually isn't a big deal unless you're really impatient. Having the
delay between making changes and testing them be very long can _really_ slow
down development, and so that's where build times really matter.

- Jonathan M Davis