[sldev] Is there a way to compile the SL viewer faster?

[Soft Noel]

On Tue, March 13, 2007 2:24 pm, Jesse Nesbitt wrote:
> Incredibuild is a pretty great tool, but it's neither free nor cheap.

Unfortunately Incredibuild doesn't help much on link times, which is where
much of the pain is. It's worth noting that Visual Studio 2005's linker is
far faster than 2003's. Anyone on the bubble about upgrading should give
2005 a shot for this alone. On multiple core systems, VS 2005 will also
build multiple projects (libraries) within a solution simultaneously, from
compiling through linking. Big win if RAM isn't tight.

It's also worth noting that you *can* use the 2005 linker with 2003 if
you're not ready to move over. I'd not do this for code you're shipping,
but it's a nice hack for personal builds.


Zero Link is where it's at on the Mac. It effectively turns every object
file into a dylib. The down sides are that it's not much faster than a
full link on the first run, only consecutive runs. There's also a small
amount of execution overhead, and you don't find some link errors until
the program is already running and can't resolve a symbol.


I've still not done a Linux build. Are the dependencies friendly for
parallel builds?

Also, Dale -- it's worth looking at tmpfs instead of the traditional RAM
disk, if you haven't. It allocates memory per file instead of acting as a
block device. This means it doesn't keep track of the contents of disused
nodes, which can prevent a lot of swap activity where you've got plenty of
transitory files.