D needs to publicize its speed of compilation

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, December 29, 2017 15:51:53 H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 29, 2017 at 03:49:07PM -0700, Jonathan M Davis via
> Digitalmars-d wrote: [...]
>
> > 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.
>
> [...]
>
> If you think a few minutes is bad... I've been on the receiving end of
> builds that take 30-45 *minutes* for 1-line code changes
> (*ahem*cough*C++ header files*cough*ahem*).  It put a serious damper on
> my ability to make any progress with the code. It's *possible*, yes, but
> it's not something I'd wish on anyone.

Oh, certainly. But my point is that once it starts taking minutes to be able
to build and run the unit tests for what you're currently doing, it becomes
infeasible to edit-test-edit-etc. in any kind of reasonable cycle. It
doesn't have to get anywhere near the 30 minute mark for it to be a serious
problem. So, of course, 30+ minutes is an utter disaster if you're looking
to test stuff as you go.

- Jonathan M Davis