3 ms·
Having never built it myself, I wonder why the hell is it so slow to compile? I've built Firefox many times, including multi-stage builds with PGO, and it takes
by 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
Having never built it myself, I wonder why the hell is it so slow to compile? I've built Firefox many times, including multi-stage builds with PGO, and it takes maybe 30 minutes tops on my 2015 era desktop. Is it because they use a lot of vendored code?
- londons_explore 3y agoMy build directory is nearly 100G, with over 1 million files... I think it's just a huge old codebase with thousands of third party libraries which all need to be built too. And, being mostly C++, there is heavy use of templates which makes compilation very slow and the resulting binaries large.
- londons_explore 3y agoGoogle has a distributed build system that can built the whole thing in about 15 seconds on a large cluster of machines. They aren't so concerned about someone building it on one machine. (to be fair, they do document ways regular folks like me can do distributed builds too)