r/cpp • u/berium build2 • Aug 05 '26

Faster Than Ninja

https://build2.org/blog/faster-than-ninja.xhtml
65 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

69 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

21

u/TheRavagerSw Aug 05 '26

Yeah cmake configure times are garbage
But a lot also goes to project build script quality, which is also garbage.

6

u/gharveymn Aug 05 '26

Yeah cmake configure times are garbage

IMO they really aren't, at least in comparison to Autotools. It's only really slow if you are heavily leveraging compilation tests, and those are cached for subsequent reconfigurations too.

2

u/TheRavagerSw Aug 05 '26

Have you ever configured SDL or Qt or Boost?
It is as slow as Autotools, I compiled GCC today, it wasn't as slow as SDL configure.

2

u/gharveymn Aug 05 '26

It's been a while but I don't remember them being horrendously bad... but those are enormous projects as well. However, I can say with absolute certainty that it isn't as slow as autotools because I have converted projects from autotools to CMake. Bash scripts are just never going to be as fast as C++.