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In MS Visual C++ 2008 is there any reason to disable incremental linking in debug builds?

From my limited reading enabling incremental builds gives me faster linking and edit & continue.

I'm at a loss to find any reason why you'd disable this great feature. What are disadvantages? Is it flakey?

EDIT: I'm working with a solution with multiple projects (a handful of dlls linking to a couple of exes) and most (but not all) have incremental linking disabled in debug.

TownCube
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1 Answers1

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Where does the question come from? You just saw the option and decided to ask?

Generally it should work pretty well, and unless it doesn't - no reason to disable it. But sometimes the dependencies don't work properly and you need to rebuild all manually. If this happens often in your project - then you should disable it.

In complex solutions with many dependencies it sometimes can get flakey. For example, changing a file in library won't trigger relinking of the executable for whatever reason, or something like that. Obviously it's not a normal course of events, disabling the feature makes it easier to avoid the problem if it occurs.

littleadv
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  • Added justification above, I have enough questions as it is without asking questions for "fun" :) I guess it could be because of all the different dependences (different projects) in the solution. – TownCube Jul 19 '11 at 10:43
  • @Cube - dll's and multiple projects could be the culprit. Its hard to trace problems when in the end you figure out that you linked to an old version of the code because the dependencies didn't kick in. Unless it takes huge amount of time, for debug just leave it disabled, safer. – littleadv Jul 19 '11 at 10:45
  • [this](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3349521/what-is-incremental-linking) link suggests that one must turn off incremental build for the production builds. – RBT Oct 18 '16 at 00:08