From: Paul Shirley <Paul AT foobar DOT co DOT uk DOT chocolat>
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: gcc compiles so slow?
Date: Wed, 18 Dec 1996 23:18:24 +0000
Organization: DrinkSoft
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Message-ID: <sZeFECAAvHuyEwUo@chocolat.foobar.co.uk>
References: <58s98p$460 AT galileo DOT polito DOT it> <32B22D13 DOT 5E7D AT cs DOT com>
 <1996Dec16 DOT 122355 DOT 27454 AT indyvax DOT iupui DOT edu> <5966cr$sov AT galileo DOT polito DOT it>
 <32B6D915 DOT 6D830668 AT alcyone DOT com>
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In article <32B6D915 DOT 6D830668 AT alcyone DOT com>, Erik Max Francis
<max AT alcyone DOT com> writes
>Jurgen Schwietering wrote:
>
>> You are right, but this is not the point, if something quite empty takes 8
>> seconds, i extrpolate and for large projects, I doubt that the difference
>> would be only the validation of a human tester.
>
>But the extrapolation is invalid.  gcc does a lot of loading of resources on
>and off the disk, running external programs, etc.  Much of the time that it
>takes for a small program are taken up by this overhead.
>
>The overhead is a "fixed cost," though; it is constant.  It becomes
>insignificant when your project is big enough.

It becomes insignificant IFF you compile increasingly large files OR you
have sufficient caching capacity to avoid the 2nd and later loads of the
compiler.

If you have sufficient ram its completely possible that the compiler
will only load once per session (guess who has lots of ram ;)

---
Paul Shirley: shuffle chocolat before foobar for my real email address