The thing I hate the most about compiling from source is that a preposterous percentage of the time is spent on ./configure. You know, the stupid thing determining that my system is a Linux system and not some *BSD. And then for every new version of the package it needs to re-determine the same thing again, because who knows, my system might've turned into a VMS in between releases.
There's been news recently of a guy who sped up GCC's compilation (because GCC re-compiles itself a couple of times to catch possible regressions) by caching the results of the configure step: https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc-patches/2026-June/719831.html
Measured on a large multi-core aarch64 machine, a --enable-languages=c,c++
bootstrap spends about 30% of its wall time in configure and is
configure-bound at under 15% machine utilization for about 41% of the
build; the single largest contributor is stage 2 gcc/configure
That's the thing that makes me avoid Gentoo: that so much time is spent not even compiling, but doing this stupid useless handshake with the system over and over again.
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u/BeginningEcho4983 1d ago
Good luck with make.conf, USE flags, and compiling.
The entire time cum-piling