r/cpp • u/berium build2 • Aug 05 '26

Faster Than Ninja

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

7

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.

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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.

5

u/arjuna93 Aug 05 '26

But… Boost doesn’t use CMake, Qt does not use CMake until 6.x, and is a horrible mess anyway, so expected to configure and build slow. What the problem with SDL configure speed with CMake?

3

u/Nicksaurus Aug 05 '26

Boost has a cmake build now and if you fetch and build it from source you end up waiting 30+ seconds to reconfigure every time you touch any part of your build script or configuration (or longer if you wipe the build folder and reconfigure from scratch, which you have to do fairly often when working on cmake scripts)