C# compilation time for large projects (compared to C++)

Question

I often hear people praise the compilation speed of C#. So far I have only made a few tiny applications, and indeed I noticed that compilation was very fast. However, I was wondering if this still holds for large applications. Do big C# projects compile faster than C++ projects of a similar size?

Answer 1

Yes, C# normally compiles a lot faster. Not always fast enough though. My biggest C# codebase with maybe a million lines of code with lots of projects took about an hour to compile. But I suspect much of this time is due to visual studios poor build system. Compile time for C++ on the other hand is usually much longer, but is also much more dependent on how you organize your code. Poor handling of header file dependencies can easily increase compilation time with several orders of magnitude.