Friday, November 27, 2015

Build speed comparison on the Raspberry Pi 2

A common misunderstanding is that all build systems are roughly as fast. This is not the case, but instead the differences can be dramatical, especially on low end hardware such as the Raspberry Pi. To demonstrate I did some benchmarks. The code can be found at github.

The program is a network debugging tool, but we don't care what it actually does. The reason it is used in this test is that it is a nice standalone executable implemented in Qt5 so compiling it takes a fair bit of CPU and it should be a fairly good example of real world applications.

The repository contains build definitions for Meson and CMake. Since the latter is currently more popular let's use it as a baseline. Compiling the application on the Raspberry Pi 2 with the Ninja backend takes 2 minutes 20 seconds.

Compiling the same project with Meson takes 1 minute and 36 seconds. That is over 30% faster. The reason for this is that Meson has native support for precompiled headers. CMake does not have this feature and, according to CMake's bugzilla, it will not have it in the future, either.

But let's not stop there. Meson also has native support for unity builds. The core principle is simple. Instead of compiling all files one by one, create a top level file that #includes all of them and compile only that. This can make things dramatically faster when you compile everything, but the downside is that it slows down incremental builds quite a lot.

A Meson unity build of the test application takes only 39 seconds, which is over 70% faster than plain CMake.

With this simple experiment we find that a build system can have a massive impact on your project with zero code changes.

1 comment:

  1. It would be interesting to see how does Cotire[1] help CMake's case.

    „Cotire (compile time reducer) is a CMake module that speeds up the build process of CMake based build systems by fully automating techniques as precompiled header usage and single compilation unit builds for C and C++.”

    [1] https://github.com/sakra/cotire

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