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Ask HN: What do you do while your code compiles?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you do while your code compiles?

#21

Post by flukus »

shubh2336 wrote: post #9

I guess that's one of the advantages of interpreted languages over compiled languages. I spend no time waiting for compilation to happen (ruby). I used to spend a lot in my previous job (C#), where the time was utilised (wasted) in going through blogs/articles.

You're still spending time compiling, it's just spread out at run time. Often with dynamic languages you're pushing the compile time down to the users.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do while your code compiles?

#24

Post by lordCarbonFiber »

Jtsummers wrote: post #11
shubh2336 wrote: post #9

I guess that's one of the advantages of interpreted languages over compiled languages. I spend no time waiting for compilation to happen (ruby). I used to spend a lot in my previous job (C#), where the time was utilised (wasted) in going through blogs/articles.

(NB: Not a criticism of interpreted languages, they add a lot of value) While long compilation times are incredibly annoying, compilation offers a first pass test on code: Is this code syntactically correct? Do (at least some of) the semantics make sense? With an interpreted language, you may be able to test for syntactic correctness with a simple scan over the language, but you're approaching compilation at that poi…

Yeah, I laugh every time someone says interpreted languages remove the "compile time" step. Once you decide to start working at scale you have to come back and hack in all the static checks the compiler would have given you for free and in my experience those tend to be 10x slower. I know running the python linter + test suite on our basic enterprise CRUD takes longer than all but the biggest C++ projects I've ever seen.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do while your code compiles?

#25

Post by sjmulder »

flukus wrote: post #20
sjmulder wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general I find that C# builds are fairly quick. Nonetheless Ruby is a pleasure to work with. As for other interpreted languages, JavaScript is a mixed bag. The Webpack/Babel stack can be smooth if hot reloading and such are set up well and work correctly, but things can quickly turn sour when other backend languages are involved with server side rendering and such.

I see you've never worked with mister "creates a project for every class" or any of his friends. C# compiles quickly, but MS build is very slow and it's noticeable when there are a lot of projects. Just for fun, try compile with csc directly one day, it's an order of magnitude (at least) faster than with msbuild.

Perhaps I'll try your suggestion and compare make against msbuild...

Re: Ask HN: What do you do while your code compiles?

#27

Post by flukus »

sjmulder wrote: post #25
flukus wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see you've never worked with mister "creates a project for every class" or any of his friends. C# compiles quickly, but MS build is very slow and it's noticeable when there are a lot of projects. Just for fun, try compile with csc directly one day, it's an order of magnitude (at least) faster than with msbuild.

Perhaps I'll try your suggestion and compare make against msbuild...

It's much faster (http://flukus.github.io/2016/11/30/2016_11_30_Rediscovering-...), so is nant or just about any build tool. The problem is visual studio (and other developers) only know about .csproj files.
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