use of build time

[markrlondon]

I read Codeproject of course!

[PIEBALDconsult]

Someone Else's Problem.

[Lost User]

Why don't you spend that time writing a document for management? Rather than compiling locally It might be cost effective for your employer sets up a build server. That way you can continue coding while your project builds on a remote server. Best Wishes, -David Delaune

[Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter]

trønderen wrote:

Have you made yourself dependent on the results of that 15 minute build to go on with your next task?

Absolutly not... That would be a disaster... The big build initiated when someone aprove a pull request an it blocks noone and nothing... I can move to the next task or even more take a break :-)

"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012

[Kiriander]

That depends on what project & what platform. The stuff I work on in Delphi or C++ builds fast. With precompiled headers for C++ anyway. Without them, I might just as well go back to my company's DOS-based product which I also maintain. I got this witty comic printed & glued to the side of the monitor attached to that DOS-based system https://xkcd.com/303

[Thornik]

"build time"?? emm... are you building on PC XT or use punched cards? :)) I use C# in VS2019, my "build time" barely exceeds 2-3 seconds. What I do during that priceless time? Oh, I can breath 1-2 times. :) I'm absolutely serious and I still have no idea HOW you can build smth for minutes. My rule: ONE current project + referenced DLLs. If I improve two projects - OK, both of 'em include in solution. But even in that case all compilation is quite quick to do smth else.

[Davyd McColl]

Some of the things I do: - watch the (short) video I've been waiting to watch (eg from [Smarter Every Day](https://www.youtube.com/user/destinws2) or [She's Got Legs](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChk1S9wy0pQY24zOUIQ2hUA) ) - solve a problem in another project (eg if there's an issue or just something I want to implement in one of my personal projects) - check up on Twitter You could also use the time to listen to a section of an audio book (eg from Audible) - I tend to use my Audible book time during commutes & garden work. The trick is being able to find something that you can switch to for that time which doesn't run over or dramatically pull you out of the focus you need to complete your current task. If possible, as mentioned elsewhere, move on to the next task.

------------------------------------------------ If you say that getting the money is the most important thing You will spend your life completely wasting your time You will be doing things you don't like doing In order to go on living That is, to go on doing things you don't like doing Which is stupid. - Alan Watts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gXTZM\_uPMY

[Thornik]

What is "serious" project? The place where you drop billion classes and believe it will work? :) Man, I made "serios projects" like security system for access control (fingerprints, face recognition, NFC cards, locks, zones, etc). There was enough code, but hell... none of my projects compiled above 3 seconds! Maybe because I used C# ? :) Pity C++ boys... they use ugly language with ugly ideas in compiler and have to wait minutes on elementary projects.

[Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter]

In this context 'serious' was there to pull OP's leg... This project has C# and JavaScript and made of several steps, the most time wasted on the Angular compiler (2/3) and on the minifing/combining process of JS and CSS... The big project itself made of nearly 200 separate projects, and while on my local machine I may compile a handful the most (several seconds) the background build compiles all of them to create a homogenous build that at the end deployed to a test server...

"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012

[gervacleto]

I absolutely agree. I have several programs ERP, Production (this one interacts with AutoCAD), Maintenance, Human Resources, a MySQL - MariaDB query browser,... and when working on one of them compiling time never takes more than 10 secs (ERP or Production). These two have close to 700,000 lines of code each. I have a Core I7 8 core 9th generation processor, 32 GB RAM, 6 GB graphic card (useless for compiling). When I am using my home laptop for the same task, its about one and a half minutes. So I think the time required for long compiling times are several things. The power of the developing machine; the number of lines to be compiled; the number of external DLL, .h,... to be linked, etc. But definitely, the machine is a VERY IMPORTANT one. My 2 cents.

Work hard and honestly and you will be rewarded by your own satisfaction.

[Carlos Perez Chavez]

My projects don't take that much time to build, mostly due to a lack of unit testing.

[Forogar]

I had one of the early laptops (by Olivetti) with twin floppy drives (no HD). I had the compiler and source code on one floppy, the libraries on another floppy. I had a long commute when I was travelling home for the weekend on the train, about four hours. The battery on the laptop would also last about four hours. I would edit my C++ code using Brief for a while, sometimes most of the trip, but sometimes I would want to test some small change so would have to do a build. A full build took just over three and a bit hours so I would just have time to do some editing, do a full build, run a couple of tests on the results, make TODO notes and shutdown just before the battery packed in, and then get off the train. I would read a paperback book during the build - sometimes a whole one. Ah, the good old days!

- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.

[Dan Neely]

It was less build time than startup time - the app built in under a minute, but the open project dialog took a few minutes to load (pulling a zillion times more data from the DB to build fat models instead of the 3 or 4 columns from a single table needed for the list) followed by the detailed application model taking a few minutes to compute (overly complex model, and because it was time dependent and took a while to stabilize computing way more data than actually shown). I ended up spending a few months trying to figure out how to build a Binder Clip Star[^] using a poor set of directions (the linked one at least shows which wire goes on the outside at all steps, but is missing anything about how you need to hold it at some steps to keep it from self-destructing halfway through). Eventually we got out of crunch mode and I was able to look at things that weren't my assigned tasks (no one else cared that performance was a tire dump fire :(( ) and un-:elephant:ed the startup code, sped the main model calculation up by a factor of ~2x, and changed how it was used to not need computing huge amounts of data beyond the displayed range for something like 5-20x typical improvement; and got the compile to start testing my code changes cycle down to under a minute. It still took the model a few weeks to go from bogus starting values to a fully stable state; my not done before the contract ran out next step would've been to save daily snapshots of the model state in the DB to allow faster startup (saving the displayed per minute values would've exploded its size and ate the disk, so we had to recompute on load) by another factor of 5-10x at which point it wouldn't have any obnoxiously long "did it lock up?" pauses. :sigh:

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt

[davecasdf]

Nag - Nag, Quit. My wife's mother at 72, her sister at 46!! COPD. Ugly. ( Note, I have been told that ridiculous doses of B vitamins make nicotine taste awful. ) Good luck. ( Who was it that took up tending a plant in his pipe? )

[W Balboos GHB]

If your builds are taking to long then just change over to a scripted language and build time drops to zero !

Ravings en masse^

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein

"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010

[honey the codewitch]

Yeah I will quit again. I just haven't figured out how to not smoke and code at the same time yet. I haven't done that since I was like 16.

Real programmers use butterflies

[Choroid]

My first autopsy was a 64 year old fellow with Black Lung My second autopsy was a 48 year old who had been smoking since age 15 If I showed you a photo of both these fellows you could not tell much difference But I guarantee you who smoke or vape would quit My build times are about 30 sec on a Windows 7 64 bit 64 bytes or RAM i7 Xeon 3.2 processor but I only use Visual Basic Net with SQLite Data Base

[BernardIE5317]

I am a lone programmer working from home and do not have the knowledge to set up a build server but thank you for the suggestion but as my builds are in the five minute range I am not sure it is needed in my situation Thank goodness I do not have to write documentation for management

[trønderen]

If compile time is an essential part of the build time, then you are making a program. You are not making a software system composed of sevearal program components merged into a whole. You are not making a software product with nasty elements such as documentation, test logs, ... Or, maybe you are, but when you say "build time" you are not talking of building the software system product, but to "build" a linkable unit from a source file. Then you might see compiling filling a noticeable part of the build time. Maybe half a second out of two seconds build time ... Last time I did a make clean, rebuilt the system from scratch, and inspected the last written timestamp on the compiled files, there were typically six to eight of them completed per second. (And last time I did this little exercise was around ten years ago; we've got faster machines today.) Using compile time as an argument against compiled languages, in favor of interpreted ones, might have been valid in the 1980s. It is not today. Besides: Because interpreted languages traditionally had lousy run time performance, all major interpreted languages today start the interpretation by doing an on-the-fly compilation... (if they do not find an already compiled version in a cache). So you don't escape the compile time - you just count it as part of the run time.

[W Balboos GHB]

First, you should learn to consider that someone might be joking. This is the lounge. Secondly, when I think build I think of the entire thing. Compile and link. If you use second-party libraries for much of your source the it will be much quicker than it really should be. Mostly, what I did I built from scratch. An exception to this was the .lib file that came with an A/D converter. For FORTRAN, years ago, I even built a graphics .lib I coded in Assembler. The whole thing, if I did it all at once, would be done in a minute, tops (on an 80286 w/HDD and 1 MB RAM). Mostly, however, the libraries were compiled once and, with the exception of an occasional addition, left as they were. Compile/link took seconds, usually. You need to get a grasp on context when commenting in the forum. Not every, and perhaps hardly anything, is taken seriously. Certainly not if there's an opening for a laugh. Maybe that long sunless winter's getting to you?

Ravings en masse^

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein

"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010