alt Hacker NewsYou run your code before running tests? IMO that's bad practice.
1 second, seriously? Even the Linux kernel is based on C, and it doesn't even have compilation times approaching that.
I guess I also work on a lot of big data projects, where getting results will take... 48 hours or so, so anything shorter than that is basically some sort of unit test or dry run... so in that context, compilation times do not even register on the things slowing me down.
Running the code immediately after making changes is the first line of testing. To run a huge test suite full of tests that are completely unrelated to the current changes would be stupid, it's a huge waste of time and energy.
Yes, seriously, have you ever written a project from scratch? A simple .c file with a thousand lines in it should easily build and start within 100ms. A compiler should be able to do basic parsing and codegen at 1M lines per core.
If your runs take 48h, of course you need a strategy to avoid noticing bugs only after dozens of hours running. You can't tell me that it is efficient to make changes and to wait for minutes or even hours before noticing that your code wasn't even syntactically valid, or maybe it did compile but your code had a small oversight and you need to start over building.
The Linux kernel is a HUGE project, one of the biggest around. Yes, a full rebuild takes a long time, depending on configuration. Incremental rebuilds do not, though.
I'm actually working on a Linux kernel module (distributed filesystem client), it's on the order of 40 KLOC. I can do a full rebuild in 10/15 seconds (debug/release), and that includes calling into the kernel's infrastructure and doing a lot of stuff that shouldn't have to be done. An incremental rebuild after changing a single .c file is about 3 seconds. Restarting the module (swapping for the newly built one) takes less than 10 seconds also. And this can be already a stressful bottleneck depending on the task. Say you're improving logging in a particular section of code, this can easily require 5-10 attempts.
I'm working on Desktop GUIs (2D/3D) too. You need a quick turnaround time as much as possible. Many changes are trivial but you want to do many small incremental improvements, recompile, run and test (manually), often with a breakpoint on the code you're currently working on.
The projects I'm working on are written in C or conservative C++, and most have from thousands to hundreds of thousands lines of code. They can be built from scratch in a short amount of time (< 10s for the smaller ones). And all of them do incremental builds in <= 10 seconds except when maybe changing the most central headers which essentially means a full rebuild.
You can also design a C/C++ codebase to always do a full rebuild, compiling everything as a single unit. That can be faster than trying to do incremental builds, for codebases of considerable size. Try out the popular raddebugger project, a complete build after checkout is about 3 seconds. It's ~300 KLOC I think.