Incredibuild is incredible

Yeah...don't do a rebuild without it :(  It's PAINFUL.

What is this, exactly?  (For those of us who do not use this program, or ones like it.)  It notice it does have something ot do with elemental, but it's hard to tell what.

Yeah......I want to think its cool too......What is it?

In the GC2 days, only your machine would compile the code. Most of the time this takes less than a minute, but when you had to REBUILD (in crunch this could be up to 4 times a day) you were left twiddling your thumbs for 20+ minutes.

Incredibuild sends your code to compile on other machines, so building and rebuilding is EXTREMELY fast.  Elemental's rebuild time on Incredibuild is 2-4 minutes. A native recompile is up to approx 45 minutes.

So yes, very cool, and increasingly necessary

So its distributed computing for building your code.  Thats awesome.  I never heard of that before.

Wow, that is cool. I need to start using that to compile my application at work. Right now, I can take a coffee break, a health break (ahem!), go for a walk, and then watch the last minute go by... Only to rinse and repeat because I missed some silly issue

So make it better, faster, and stronger.  Paint it a different color, call it something else and repackage it.   Its the american way.

I like this idea...... my expericane with coding has made "compiling......." one of my least favorite phrases.

I.. agree?

Sounds cool.  It must also cut down on staff doing this

That could prove extremely useful... Definitely a very good idea. I've never written anything of notable length, but I imagine at larger sizes the times would get extremely long...

I like how Stardock gets their developers nice machines: 4 cores and up from the picture.

Yeah but at stardock instead of sword fights its stinging people with BEES.

You mean the Japanese way?

I love Incredibuild.  It used to take us ages to compile Galciv2, and if you changed one header file, you'd be stuck re-compiling forever.  In those days, when we would have build release days, we'd build for 25 minutes, find a bug, build another 25 minutes, find a bug, and repeat.  Very frustrating when you're trying to get a build out that day. 

I remember one test with galciv2 when we first got Incredibuild.  I was able to completely build GC2 about 7 or 8 times before it finished building once the old-fashioned way.

Elemental is a lot bigger than GC2 code-wise so this program has been a huge time-saver.

Incredibuild is definitely fun to play with and can make a huge difference.  There is an awful lot of other things you can do to improve compile times as well.  Here's a few articles you might be interested in (assuming you haven't come across them before):

http://www.cygnus-software.com/papers/precompiledheaders.html

http://gamesfromwithin.com/the-care-and-feeding-of-pre-compiled-headers

http://gamesfromwithin.com/how-incredible-is-incredibuild

Some of the articles are a bit old, but the advice on how to use pre-compiled headers, forward declarations and code structure etc is all good.

That does sound pretty cool.  (Hopefully does end up saving a good amount of time for beta testing and development.)

It's so incredible this is the second time you've posted a thread about it right?

the replies in this thread are identical as well. so Incredibuild is so incredible that it bumps threads about itself!

I could've sworn the first one was posted months ago...

We used to use a pre-compiled header with GalCiv2 but our policy is always to make a clean rebuild when we make a build that's going to the public, which pretty much negated that benefit because it would rebuild the pre-compiled header.

It's not quite Smalltalk, but on the other hand, you can actually make games with it...

@CariElf - but surely a pre-compiled header can still save you time?  Otherwise every C++ file that includes (say) Windows.h has to recompile it, rather than just once per build?

Precompiled headers have bad side effects sometimes (like making your headers unusable without including the pch because you forgot something, and it doesn't show until you actually try to give the .h to a client of your framework).

Your incredibuild is awesome because you have a lot of cores to run it upon. I counted 45 cores being used and then there's a crollbar. That's a lot of machines and must speed the process a lot indeed.

Great, do you realize you just added Yet More Reading to my winter break reading list? CURSE YOU!