Richard Cownie (tich@pobox.com) on 6/27/10 wrote:
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>Mark Roulo (nothanks@xxx.com) on 6/26/10 wrote:
>---------------------------
>
>>I've worked on a Java/C++ product. I worked on the Java side. The C++ side had
>>a build time of four hours (compiler wasn't GCC ...). This absolutely sucked, and
>>parallel compiling it wasn't going to help much.
>
>I'm mystified about why "parallel compiling it wasn't going
>to help much" ?? I work on a project with about 3M
>lines of C++, and we can build the whole thing from scratch
>in about 15 minutes on a parallel compile farm.

Each developer didn't have a compile farm. We didn't have a group-wide compile farm, either. Still don't, to the best of my knowledge, although with faster machines (CPU, RAM, hard drive) and some re-organization of the codebase, I think the compile time is down to about 1 hour today.

With a compile farm we could have fixed this (or at least mitigated it) with hardware. But we didn't (or, maybe I should say, "they" didn't).

-Mark Roulo