We have a fairly large C++ project built in VS2005 that can take up to 40 minutes to compile and build from scratch, and a further 10 minutes for the installers as the software is being built in both 32-bit and 64-bit configurations. I would like to reduce this time to somewhere around 10 minutes at least as I feel it's important to get fast build feedback when using continuous integration.
When using incremental builds by deleting the final linked files but not the .obj files the build process seems to go much faster, however errors seem to pop up here and there, such as .dlls not being able to be loaded. From a clean build everything works fine. I am using TeamCity as the CI system of choice.
Maybe the incremental build behavior is better in later versions of Visual Studio and it might be a good motivation to upgrade ? Has anyone encountered similar issues?
Good question.
When I was putting together a CI system for a large C++ project for Microsoft Visual Studio 2003/2005/2008 I enounteded problems as well with incremental builds. Especially when using pre-compiled headers it seems to not work under all circumstances to do an incremental build. I would be interested hear if someone has a detailed explanation of this, i.e. what works and what doesn't.
In my case, the project took more than one hour to build from scratch, so in order to have some reasonable speed of feedback intraday, I ended up doing a clean nightly build which was the release build and intraday I used incremental builds based on the nightly. This worked fairly well, except for cases when the incremental building wasn't able to pick up changes correctly and re-compile all necessary things. I tried this approach because I consider getting feedback fast very important and if the incremental build fails once a month or less, I was ready to live with the comprimise.
In general, I like to have things better than what I described above, so in other projects where it has been possible to get more hardware and re-organize the components to be built in parallel, I usually do complete re-builds. If you can do builds in parallel you can speed up building a lot.
Other things to consider are:
There are a lot of things which can be done to get building faster and I would in most cases consider these to incremental builds.