New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: What is it about compiling that is so time-consuming?

Ask HN: What is it about compiling that is so time-consuming?
5 by warrenm | 5 comments on Hacker News.
20 years ago, the "cool kids" (aka the egocentric dorks who wanted to be thought of as "special") would brag about installing Gentoo from source, or something similar, and how the kernel had only taken 3 days to compile now that they had a gig of RAM instead of 384 megs Even today, a not-insignificant number of projects/tools/etc are distributed as source , and you have to build it locally ... sometimes taking hours Other tools (eg Apache) are distributed both as binaries or source, and you can run the "out of the box" edition, or 'tweak' it a little compiling yourself...but again - it takes forever to get up and running (and heaven help you when an update comes out) What is it about compilation that is so time-consuming? Fundamentally, it's a [relatively-simple] translation from one language to another - with most compiled languages having been around for a long time Surely compiling locally shouldn't be so astronomically time-consuming...should it?

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