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Comment by lerno

6 months ago

"Incremental compilation is fast", is something people only talk about when normal compilation speeds are abysmal. Sadly, C++ set the expectations here, which made both Rust and Swift think that compilation times in the minutes is fine.

If your code compiles in 1 second from scratch then what do you need incremental compilation for?

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lerno

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tialaramex  6 months ago

> If your code compiles in 1 second from scratch then what do you need incremental compilation for?

That's entirely fair. But, when I watch somebody like Jon Blow, with his 1 second from scratch compilation the result seems to be that he just iterates a lot more without being significantly more productive than I am. I can imagine for some parts of video game design fast iteration might be crucial, yet I struggle to imagine that compilation speed is what matters there. Systems design, art direction, plotting, these don't seem like factors where you need those one second compile times.