✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

I Made A Realtime C/C++ Build Visualizer ・ Daniel Hooper

danielchasehooper.com · 1,325 words · saved by 1 readers

Many software projects take a long time to compile. Sometimes that’s just due to the sheer amount of code, like in the LLVM project. But often a build is slower than it should be for dumb, fixable reasons. I’ve had the suspicion that most builds are doing dumb stuff, but I had no way to see it. So I’ve been working on a cross-platform tool to help speed up builds (you can try it, see below). It works with any build system or programming language (Not just C/C++). Its timeline looks like this: It’s more than just a generic system profiler: it looks for build-specific problems. A few examples: using make without the -j flag, disproportionate time being spent on certain files or compiler phases (as reported by tools like clang’s -ftime-trace), and commands that could’ve been run in parallel but weren’t. It’s especially helpful for optimizing CI builds, which are often clean rebuilds without caching. I named it What the Fork after the fork() system call that spawns new processes. You use i

I Made A Real-Time Build Visualizer ・ Daniel Hooper Daniel Hooper Home ・ Articles ・ Projects ・ About ・ I Made A Real-Time Build Visualizer August 13, 2025・6 minute read Here it is showing the build of a macOS app: Your browser does not support the video tag. Before I explain what you're looking at, here's some background: Sometimes software takes a long time to compile just due to how much code it has, like in the LLVM project. But often a build is slower than it could be for dumb, fixable reasons. I've had the suspicion that most builds are doing dumb stuff, but I had no way to see it . So I'

Explore this link on the map →

related reading