> > Sure. The key is that you have 8 GB of RAM, nothing large running to eat it, and > you > > do make clean ; make ; make clean ; make. Everything runs out of RAM cache then and > > it's super-fast pretty much regardless of your processor speed. > > And I presume this is on Linux, where gcc runs quite nicely? Because I do the same > thing on my quad-core hyperthreaded 2.8GHz 6GB Windows system and it's nowhere near > 30 seconds, even when entirely in the cache, which I generally attribute to mingw > being poorly optimized for Windows.
In fairness, 30 seconds was pre-C++, pre-all-the-MESS-CPUs-being-enabled, and pre-Micko-and-Curt moving all of MESS into the MAME tree. It's 1 minute 15 seconds on a make -j9 now, including linking. (C++ is bad juju for GCC).