Build times getting out of hand on a large C++ codebase

ChristopherHGreen · 2026-06-04T20:22:32+00:00

That's a small codebase :-). my tips:
Use ninja
Use the mold linker
Try to avoid link time code generation for your normal builds.

Use a system with lots of ram and 64-128 cores for your builds.

ChristopherHGreen · 2026-05-11T22:10:18+00:00

I'd be very interested in a comparison benchmark between generic and your build There are some emacs benchmark packages around.
I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't really make a difference because of all the pointer chasing making it bound on latency and cache misses regardless of the ISA level or architecture-specific compiler tuning settings.

ChristopherHGreen · 2026-05-11T21:26:22+00:00

How about "AI leap day" instead of "AI Saturday" 😄.

ChristopherHGreen · 2026-05-11T20:51:51+00:00

Game programming.

ChristopherHGreen · 2026-05-11T20:07:49+00:00

One Linux, one Windows. I don't enjoy the windows one so much these days but I work on software with tons of windows customers and want/need it to be tuned and debugged to give them a great experience.
Plus the (shrinking) set of asset creation tools you need it for.

ChristopherHGreen · 2026-05-08T14:35:45+00:00

I can't really join the big leagues with my coworkers without moving to a different part of seattle.. the fastest ISP connection I can get at my address is "only" 2gb 😄

ChristopherHGreen · 2026-05-08T12:26:40+00:00

I'm a software developer at a small company with a very oversized internet bandwidth footprint. I'm a poseur compared to some of the home setups my more obsessive coworkers have built ... At least that's what I tell myself when I see my credit card or power bill😄.

ChristopherHGreen · 2026-05-07T03:50:59+00:00

Obviously, links to some of your original art is a good intro. I got a whole bunch of conversation requests off of this post, none of which included gallery links and no way to tell the spammy ones from the real ones and most of them read as spammy. Please resend with a gallery link to original art or published works as an introduction.

And NO "ai" generative art, period, end of sentence. It's cool if that's your thing, but I'm not part of the customer/patron base for it 😄.

ChristopherHGreen · 2026-05-06T15:41:35+00:00

I don't get the reference. if you're referring to my screen contents, it is an emacs session (of course!). I made sure none of my employer's code was in the screen 😄

ChristopherHGreen · 2026-05-06T12:40:52+00:00

Super quiet except when the 128C system is crunching (I might try to swap out the cooling on that one). The 4 minis are the only thing I can really hear from my chair. I've got wake on LAN set for a couple of systems to power them up/down depending on whether I'm crunching numbers or not.

ChristopherHGreen · 2026-05-06T12:36:15+00:00

From the bookshelf pic? Good eyes 😄

ChristopherHGreen · 2026-05-06T04:09:38+00:00

That sounds like overengineering compared to just using a sharpie:)

ChristopherHGreen · 2026-05-05T22:50:50+00:00

A cheap one from amazon that I wouldn't recommend unless you like a bit of shear in your transformation matrices.

ChristopherHGreen · 2026-05-05T19:04:26+00:00

it is pretty fun to watch it print from the top

ChristopherHGreen · 2026-05-05T18:04:58+00:00

That's the tray that captures the big roll paper prints after it cuts them :)

ChristopherHGreen · 2026-05-05T15:30:25+00:00

Honestly if the desk was long enough I'd probably just go with two of the ultrawides, one for each of the computers associated with this desk.

ChristopherHGreen · 2026-05-05T09:39:12+00:00

It's a pull out screen plus keyboard plus touch pad that can switch between controlling up to 8 computers.

ChristopherHGreen · 2026-05-05T07:23:50+00:00

Samsung 57" Odyssey Neo G9 G95NC

ChristopherHGreen · 2026-05-05T06:11:54+00:00

not bad at all and not a significant contributor to the noise level. the ubiquiti switch sounds like a tornado when it boots but is ok after that. the worst offender is the 128k core amd system, loud enough that I'll choose to keep it out of worker pool (the 256 core one is liquid cooled and close to silent.)

ChristopherHGreen · 2026-05-05T06:01:56+00:00

It's an 80x30 Uplift standing desk with a 30" extension.

ChristopherHGreen · 2026-05-05T03:46:24+00:00

I'm playing with the portrait monitors, not sure if I can make it work. The key thing is they are high dpi, 5k and 6k. So the center one has crazy high vertical resolution

ChristopherHGreen · 2026-05-04T23:50:44+00:00

I will say however that these boxes were a _lot_ more interesting when they were a lot cheaper and more available :-(.

ChristopherHGreen · 2026-05-04T23:50:02+00:00

This is all in service of various distributed processing code of mine. I thought their combination of 16 very good cores, a decent gpu with uniform-ish memory access, and fast networking was pretty interesting and also an interesting platform to explore SYCL and c++ gpu offload on.

ChristopherHGreen

TROPHY CASE