That was almost a blast from my past. They were using a lot of the tools I used at a previous company. That company's UI code base was 3 MM SLOC or so and we

That was almost a blast from my past. They were using a lot of the tools I used at a previous company. That company's UI code base was 3 MM SLOC or so and we used perforce and silk though we didn't use any build accelerators as I had the UI down to under 1 hour from scratch and the backend was under 3 hours if I recall and this was 8 years ago or so. That codebase was a beast and there was code from 1979 floating around in some of the core Fortran routines. The scary part was the app ostensibly had backward compatibility to files created in the 80s though it was well designed enough to have anticipated most of cases. I'm sort of surprised their build takes so long without accelerators but then again I'm not as without using precompiled headers I think our build was several hours longer. If they could not structure their projects to take advantage of pch files and if the source is very #include heavy I can see it. How external code references are handled is another reason interpreted languages rock and Java/.NET are superior to C and C++ build systems in my experience.