4 ms·

It might not be a big hurdle. OS developers aren’t as sensitive to compile times as app devs. An hour of futzing to bring up on a hardware dev board isn’t unhea

It might not be a big hurdle. OS developers aren’t as sensitive to compile times as app devs. An hour of futzing to bring up on a hardware dev board isn’t unheard of (although 5-10 mins would be more typical). There was a big regression in compile times in the linux 2.2 to 2.4 time frame (the kernel grew a lot of functionality) but i don’t recall it getting much more than a little grumbling. That was in the time of the Linux from Scratch book and Gentoo stage 0 builds. Some people don’t mind overnight compiles if it means they can specify just exactly the right combo of compiler flags to eeek out the max performance of their cpu.

guenthert 4y ago
I worked on a (legacy now) larg-ish code base (mostly C++ '03 with some self-imposed restrictions, but extensive usage of templates) for an 'embedded' system (enterprise NAS). A full build took north of 6h on the reasonable beefy desk-side workstations available to us (we considered distributed builds, but never got to test it afair). Every once in a while there was some grumbling about the build times, but it never really improved (every three years or so we got better build machines, but by that time the code base had grown as well), partly, I suspect, due to https://xkcd.com/303/ https://xkcd.com/303/ and partly because we learned to work-around that by finding the Makefile in the tree which (likely) gave us a proper build in the shortest possible time for the files we were actually working on (not being helped by the most complex Makefile tree I've ever seen). I very much doubt that such large build times would go over well in the Linux kernel community.
yencabulator 4y ago
Kernel compiles are a classic benchmark by which Linus has judged performance-related patches. Kernel developers do care(, mostly about incremental builds).

guenthert 4y ago

I worked on a (legacy now) larg-ish code base (mostly C++ '03 with some self-imposed restrictions, but extensive usage of templates) for an 'embedded' system (enterprise NAS). A full build took north of 6h on the reasonable beefy desk-side workstations available to us (we considered distributed builds, but never got to test it afair). Every once in a while there was some grumbling about the build times, but it never really improved (every three years or so we got better build machines, but by that time the code base had grown as well), partly, I suspect, due to https://xkcd.com/303/ https://xkcd.com/303/ and partly because we learned to work-around that by finding the Makefile in the tree which (likely) gave us a proper build in the shortest possible time for the files we were actually working on (not being helped by the most complex Makefile tree I've ever seen). I very much doubt that such large build times would go over well in the Linux kernel community.

yencabulator 4y ago

Kernel compiles are a classic benchmark by which Linus has judged performance-related patches. Kernel developers do care(, mostly about incremental builds).