Speeding up build process with distutils

Question

I am programming a C++ extension for Python and I am using distutils to compile the project. As the project grows, rebuilding it takes longer and longer. Is there a way to s

Answer 1

In the limited examples you provided in the link, it seems fairly obvious that you have some misunderstanding on what some of the features of the language are. For example, the gsminterface.h has a whole lot of namespace level statics, which is probably unintended. Every translation unit that includes that header will compile it's own version for everyone of the symbols declared in that header. Side effects of this are not only the compile time but also code bloat (larger binaries) and link time as the linker needs to process all those symbols.

There are still many questions that affect the build process that you have not answered, for example, whether you clean every time before you recompile. If you are doing that, then you might want to consider ccache, which is a tool that caches the result of the build process, so that if you run make clean; make target only the preprocessor will be run for any translation unit that has not changed. Note that as long as you keep maintaining most code in headers, this will not offer much of an advantage, as a change in a header modifies all translation units that include it. (I don't know your build system, so I cannot tell you whether python setup.py build will clean or not)

The project does not seem large otherwise, so I would be surprised if it took more than a few seconds to compile.