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MinGW is still slow a year after that question was posted, and I've tried to fix it but there's no difference. Someone else apparently has the same problem too, but no fix.

I'm trying to compile GCC and each object file is taking several seconds. (This varies wildly; sometimes it's 1 second, sometimes it's 30.) (In any case, though, it's definitely not my computer; it's fine with other compilers.) Does anyone know why it's so slow, and if there are any options I can set to improve the compile time?

Thanks!

Community
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user541686
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1 Answers1

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Well, MSYS and Cygwin have to be slow by design, or in other words are very hard to make faster. There is continuous string processing of every command passed to the Bash shell, the POSIX shared memory pool to manually manage etc...

If you want to build GCC on Windows, I strongly suggest installing a free VM software, like Virtualbox, install a lightweight distro, and cross-compile a Windows toolchain. From Windows, use some other build system than autocrap (CMake, Qt's qmake, ...) and speed should not be an issue anymore. It might sound like a lot of hassle and the complete opposite of a Minimal SYStem, but heck, it works sooo much better, and much faster.

rubenvb
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  • +1 That is a brilliant idea! Thanks so much, I'll try it soon! – user541686 Apr 12 '11 at 14:36
  • If there is no way around, this [link](http://www.ysbl.york.ac.uk/~lohkamp/speedup_compilation.html) might help a little. – Wiffzack Sep 20 '17 at 13:30
  • Using MSYS2 is a big speed improvement over MSYS. And when using a RAM drive to configure and compile sources it's a lot faster. Still not as fast as cross-compiling from Linux, but doable. For the RAM drive I use ImDisk (http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk) with a command like this: `imdisk -a -t vm -s 4G -m R: -p "/FS:NTFS /V:RAMDisk /Q /Y" -o rem` – Brecht Sanders Oct 19 '20 at 12:35