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I disagree that it's a pain point in C++ or in Rust. You're generally just doing a lot more stuff and shifting the pain to incremental debug builds (so that the

I disagree that it's a pain point in C++ or in Rust. You're generally just doing a lot more stuff and shifting the pain to incremental debug builds (so that the slow path doesn't need recompilation) is a perfectly viable solution. Template metaprogramming has never been the pain point in C++ for me because nobody wanted to use templates (after a certain points), huge deps are. Anecdotally, the slow builds I've experienced in Rust were case sof overzealous Serialize implementation (aka, people adding Serialize to everything, just in case) or deps on large external projects (often in C++). Coming from C++, where you either have someone who knows how to debug build times, I think the comparison with rust is unfair. cargo-timings is pretty nice and gives you a hint on what to look for. This article actually shows debugging build times is not that hard. I did that for a personal project (which compiled part of OpenCV) and I'm certainly no ninja. I remember attempting similar tasks in C++ and getting completely lost.

menaerus 5y ago
I live and breathe C++ full time for more than a decade now. Compiling C++ _has_ always been pain point and big efficiency killer. Especially if you come from other languages (I don't but I enjoy learning other stuff too). It doesn't matter if you're directly writing your own template code or not because you're always gonna pull it in indirectly, even in most simplistic and inrealistic case when your sole dependency is C++ runtime library. OTOH debugging C++ build times is no more than recompiling your code with -ftime-trace and inspecting it with ninjatracing, which btw is a great tool. However, getting the data as you see is not the real challenge here but in how to use this data to optimize your build pipeline while keeping the functionality and not introducing more technical burden. That is very difficult and for many projects questionable if the benefits will outweigh the total cost invested in it.

menaerus 5y ago

I live and breathe C++ full time for more than a decade now. Compiling C++ _has_ always been pain point and big efficiency killer. Especially if you come from other languages (I don't but I enjoy learning other stuff too). It doesn't matter if you're directly writing your own template code or not because you're always gonna pull it in indirectly, even in most simplistic and inrealistic case when your sole dependency is C++ runtime library. OTOH debugging C++ build times is no more than recompiling your code with -ftime-trace and inspecting it with ninjatracing, which btw is a great tool. However, getting the data as you see is not the real challenge here but in how to use this data to optimize your build pipeline while keeping the functionality and not introducing more technical burden. That is very difficult and for many projects questionable if the benefits will outweigh the total cost invested in it.