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I made a real-time C/C++/Rust build visualizer

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).

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. Unexpected build steps are often the source of slowdowns and are even more likely in bigger projects, which often use something like cargo, make, bazel, gradle, or xcodebuild instead of a shell script. Here CMake gets Xcode’s path with xcode-select -print-path, the OS version with sw_vers, and then recursively calls cmake/make a few times for good measure, and finally compiles and links a file.

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