I'm using Asset Importer (assimp) to load in models. However, as soon as I started building my program, I found that the linking step was going extremely slow - ~55 seconds versus the sub-2 seconds that it took without including the assimp library and headers. I have about 30 files in the whole project and only 1 implementation file uses assimp.
I'm using the mingw g++ compiler, and in order to get AssImp to work I had to build it with CMake (with the no_boost flag, no tools compilation). I've tried both linking it dynamically and statically, but with the same slowdown. After looking at the output lib and dll sizes (34 and 20 MB), and coming across this Compiling assimp with MinGW post, I attempted to build without debug symbols (removing all instances of -g in the cmake options) but wasn't able to force CMake to stop building the debugging information into the libraries - and I'm not entirely certain that could influence link times in the first place.
I then looked at possible CodeBlocks + MinGW build slowdowns, and came across this post: Why is MinGW very slow?, which would make sense if the compilation of assimp was slow, but not the linking into another program.
Is this just an unavoidable reality of using assimp, or am I doing something horribly wrong?
