A Survey on How to Improve Build Performance on Large C++ Projects

Abstract

C++ has been widely used for developing various system software such as compilers, web browsers, and so on. However, as software is growing in size and complexity, long build times of the C++ projects has been problematic. This article introduces and discusses three effective methods to improve build times of the C++ projects (i.e., Unity Builds, Zapcc, and C++ Modules). First, we introduce the background of long build times in large C++ projects and analyze breakdowns of the build times to identify the bottleneck in the build processing. Then, we describe each method and indicate how much it can improve the build performance. We also discuss future work in this research area.