Performance-oriented development in the commercial computing world

Toby Thain [toby at telegraphics.com.au]: Compiling a few directories takes seconds, but linking takes a little longer. Perhaps 30s on my 24GB system at work but more like 2-3m in its previous 8GB incarnation. There must be plenty of projects where a top-level build takes quite a while. In our case giving developers slow machines wouldn't help the final product since it runs on specific hardware. That must be true of a fair chunk of embedded development today (network boxes, phones, consoles ...). I agree that *testing* an end-user application on the least capable acceptable hardware is a good idea. Even there though, I don't see how forcing the developer to use that hardware for development achieves anything other than slowing them down. Antonio arcarlini at iee.org