If my PC compiled faster I'd be here less...

Basically I often hit compile and whilst I wait (especially if it's making a debug exe) I often pop into these forums for a quick check up, and naturally this takes longer than the actual compile. I'm gonna get a new PC soon that compiles so fast I won't be able to visit anymore ;-p

Things is I guess dual cores may not compile that much faster than my 3GHz anyway if the IDE only makes use of single core, or is that plain false as the new chips are super-dooper?

uh? My compile times are less than 3 seconds. wha tthe heck are you compiling? X-D

My bet is Grey uses Include rather than Import :-p

My current game source is 146k spread over 15 files (edit: using Include), and that compiles in about 3-4 seconds.

I get very different compile time when compiling on vista with UAC on, and I'm not working on a 'documents' folder. It gets ultra slower. In any other scenario XP, or vista without UAC and antivirus OFF, I get 2 - 3 seconds for BIG applications

Be sure you're not using a Norton antivirus. It is a resource eater, and it scans (very slowly) every executable you create, increasing considerably the compile time.

If your compiler doesn't use multiple threads, you probably won't get much of a boost, but I think the latest processors from Intel use some kind of technology that automatically overclocks one core if the other one is idle so nothing's wasted. However, I heard that you have to use task manager to adjust the process priority or affinity to get it to work, and it doesn't work that well when it does activate.

BTW, if you haven't ordered yet, you should probably get the new 45nm hafnium-based Intel Penryn series processor. They're faster, run cooler, and are more power efficient than any other processor today.

Brucey has it right.

Also my project is pretty large (I'm localising Fairway Solitaire at the moment). Even though it may only be a few seconds it FEELS like eternity ;-)

Heh... "pretty large"...

My reasonably large project takes about 10 mins to clean-build on my Mac Mini. (either on OS X native, or Win32/Linux running in Parallels on it).
On the powerbook... you may as well find a good book to read.

But yeah... anything current will tend to compile faster than an older CPU with the same or slightly better speed (all those other system enhancements help a lot).

My souce is 1.81Mb so it's still quite large by most standard ;-). However, soon my framework will be turned into a module which'll make it a lot quicker to compile. 10 mins sounds HORRIBLE btw. Thanks for the CPU info.

The word Bloat and Optimize come to mind!

How can you say 88,000 lines of Max code isn't optimized?!! :-p