What's the best way to minimize the need of run time checks?

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Gregory Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz>:
> Nine hours to compile a simple text editor sounds completely
> ridiculous to me, even for the times. Something must have been very,
> very badly wrong.

Some ten years back full compilations of our product could take 23
hours. The bulk of the time was spent thrashing, as SCons produced a
dependency graph so large (~ 90,000 nodes) the Python process couldn't
fit in the RAM of the build machine. When we split the build by the
target architecture, build times came down to three hours.

Still, the main problem was that the whole code base was in a single
repository. By the time I left, work was under way to divide the code
into independent components.

A similar componentization strategy in my current job has made it so
that a full build takes less than a minute, and an incremental build a
few seconds.


Marko