My build system has been getting slower in the last weeks. I don’t know if the amount of dependencies in our project, the number of includes-in-headers or maybe the increasing number f third-party libraries has made “make” to go crazy, but, at the end, I can launch the “make debug” and go for a coffee until I see the “build finished” message.

So I have decided to give a try to ccache. ccache is a program that caches object files produced by gcc. When you run it instead of gcc, it takes the pre-processeed source file, the arguments and some other things, and calculates a hash code. Then it runs gcc as usual, but it also copies the .o (with the hash code) to a cache directory. Next time you try to compile the same source file (and with the same gcc arguments), it checks if the hash code is the same and, in that case, it quickly returns the .o you compiled before.

It is a good idea, but I’m not really sure if it will make any difference. Yesterday I tried it for a while, but I couldn’t say my build was speed-light fast…. I will keep trying.