Study: build times for D programs

[Andrej Mitrovic]

On 7/24/12, Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
> snip

I've got a codebase where it takes DMD 15 seconds to output an error
message to stdout. The error message is 3000 lines long. (and people
thought C++ errors were bad!). It's all thanks to this bug:
http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=8082

The codebase isn't public yet so I can't help you with comparisons.
Non-release full builds take 16 seconds for a template-heavy ~12k
codebase (without counting lines of external dependencies). I use a
lot of static foreach loops btw.

Personally I think full builds are very fast compared to C++, although
the transition from a small codebase which takes less than a second to
compile to a bigger codebase which takes over a dozen seconds to
compile is an unpleasant experience. I'd love to see DMD speed up its
compile-time features like templates, mixins, static foreach, etc.