kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Lorenzo Marcantonio <l.marcantonio@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Apr 09, 2013 at 04:19:12PM -0500, Adam Wolf wrote:
> Careful about saying you've got time too loudly :)
> 
> For me, a clean compile takes 20 minutes, while a small change might
> take a minute or two.

A little more here, but the basic idea is that. The *worst* compile I've
ever done is with an Atom N450 (almost 4 hours from scratch, with
scripting XD)

> When developing Kicad, what are the typical compile times between each edit?
> I assume that much of the code doesn't need to be recompiled each time one
> makes an edit to the code, and so it should take much less than the 45min+
> it was taking when I tried to build it. My experience with C++ has always
> been tiny files.

Optimization levels and debug settings change a lot the compile time,
too... (but less optimization give you less warnings, usually. Be
careful).  Also enabling scripting almost doubles the compile time for
pcbnew :( Huge amounts of RAM help, too. Less than 2GB is suffering,
I think.  However huge is relative, today's laptops have 8GB *from the
factory*! A full build tree of mine is about 4GB (without bzr repo, but
the tag file is about 1.5GB), so lots of RAM help with caching, too.

Of course if you touch core includes like colors.h or
layers_id_colors_and_visibility.h you'll have a full rebuild awaiting
(that's what's I'm working on these days...)

Localized changes to a .cpp (like one of the class_xxx.cpp files) is
pretty fast to compile; in fact with full debug information (-g3) is the link
phase the bottleneck (I have a pcbnew executable of... 330MB :D:D).
However without that good luck interpreting core files...

-- 
Lorenzo Marcantonio
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