It seems they're benchmarking on toy programs to create media hype. In my previous job I found out two non-removable bottlenecks in C++ builds: 1) linking (I do

It seems they're benchmarking on toy programs to create media hype. In my previous job I found out two non-removable bottlenecks in C++ builds: 1) linking (I don't know of any parallel linker), 2) IO (writing of debug information). None of this is relevant in their benchmarks. In my case, the build result, in _release_ mode, was a DLL file of about 40MB, and corresponding debug info of about 100MB. In _debug_ mode, multiply debug info by a factor of ca 5-10. (Individual PDBs on disk collected together were ~GB, but final PDB was smaller.) Release parallel builds on a 4-core machine, with optimizations and all, (with HT) were noticeably faster because they generated less IO. Link time of _another_ DLL consisting of many (thousands) separate object files took more time than compilation itself. There's also another product (I won't name it because it created more problems for me than it solved) which integrates in VS and seamlessly distributes the compilation over machines in the local network. I stopped using it because it often generated corrupt PDB files and messed up IntelliSense in VS. To summarize, I have two issues with their system (apart from "good enough" solutions for distributed compilation already existing): 1) they say nothing about speeding up the linking stage, and related to that 2) if they mess with linking, I'm not confident that they are reliably handling debug info. Sure, everything works in "toy projects", but.