Sass / Compass - overwrite css to slow

Question

I decided to use the Sass version of Foundation 4.

I followed the instructions from the official Foundation 4 documentation:
For a new installation i started with following code in my console:

sudo run compass create <project-name> -r zurb-foundation --using foundation

To compile my SCSS Files to CSS i ran:

compass watch

After that everything works fine and i'm ready to start editing my files.

Now my problem:
Every time when i make changes in my SCSS files, it would take almost 8 seconds to compile the CSS-file. Status in console:

Change detected at 09:52:48 to: app.scss

displays very fast, but after that

overwrite css/app.css

is to slow.

What am I doing wrong?

Versions:
Sass 3.2.12 (Media Mark)
Compass 0.12.2 (Alnilam)

You'll find my SASS-file structure here:
Github SASS-file structure

Answer 1

You're not doing anything wrong. Compass (built on Ruby) is notoriously slow in compiling SASS/SCSS. Especially larger, more complex structures like Foundation. 8-10 seconds is about average for my Foundation projects, too. It doesn't even seem to matter whether you use the more advanced language features or not, it's just a dog.

Unfortunately, the only other effective "live" compiler i know of is node-sass, which is VERY fast, but miserably far behind on SASS language support. You can't use it with more recent versions of Foundation (5.3+, if fuzzy memory serves).

Since you're using Foundation 4, you could try setting up Node & use node-sass to compile. i think it'll support the older F4 code, just make sure you don't use any SASS 3.3 language features (maps, for instance) in your own code.