SCons build tool speed

[Peter Hansen]

ted wrote:
> How does the speed of the Scons build tool compare with Ant? Right now with 
> out Ant builds take around an hour. Hoping to speed that up.

Don't tools like Scons, Ant, and for that matter "make" just
execute other programs?  So that 99% of the time is consumed
external to the Scons, Ant, or make process itself?  Why
do you think the speed of the build tool is of any significance
compared to the time for things like compilers and linkers
to execute?

-Peter