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Real-world large C++ build times and TwineCompile

TwineCompile is an addon for C++Builder that is currently in GetIt for free to update subscription customers, for all editions, including Pro. Let’s see how well it works with real-world projects.

TwineCompile speeds up C++Builder compile time significantly. To test this, we got two large open source C++ libraries which build with C++Builder: Xerces and SDL 2. Xerces is an XML library, and SDL a very well-known open source windowing and input library, often used for games. They’re both great test cases since they’re decent sized large C++ codebases.

build time without ide and with tc twinecompile high res 2

  • In-IDE, without TwineCompile, Xerces took 5 minutes 19 seconds to build. With TwineCompile, Xerces took 51 seconds. That’s a 6x speedup
  • In-IDE, without TwineCompile, SDL 2 took 2 minutes 10 seconds to build. With TwineCompile, SDL 2 took 21 seconds. That’s a 6.2x speedup

Pretty good results! Imagine speeding up your own C++ project build times by that much – six times as fast. This scales roughly with the number of CPU cores.

Details:

  • These results were generated on an older Intel i7-3930K processor (6 cores with hyperthreading) with 16GB of RAM, on a Samsung XP941 M.2 PCIe SSD disk.
  • The performance gain is mostly due to the number of cores available. We’d expect you to see, on a clean build, roughly a 4x gain with a 4-core CPU, or a 12x speedup with a 12-core CPU. However, TwineCompile also implements caching and has other techniques which help in other scenarios (ie make, not a clean build, or more resource-constrained machines) so that a Make can be even faster. There is a 50x speedup we sometimes cite which can be achieved in some scenarios – very impressive.

You can find TwineCompile in GetIt today, in the ‘IDE Plugins’ section. It’s free for Professional as well as Architect/Enterprise if you have active update subscription (this is new, it was not always available to Pro, but it is now.)

twinecompile in getit

I recommend you download! We’re keen to hear the difference it makes to your project.

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About author

David is an Australian developer, currently living in far-north Europe. He is the senior product manager for C++ at Idera, looking after C++Builder and Visual Assist.

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