CPU's and IDE's

Coding Horror (a great blog) has named the Athlon 64 the Developer's Choice CPU for code compiling.

For compiling .NET code, the Athlon 64 is 33% faster than a Pentium 4 of the same speed. That's a significant productivity boost for a developer. Time spent compiling is time wasted staring at the build output window. Compiling doesn't typically take long enough to force me to ALT+TAB away and start doing something else, so there's no real incentive to multitask.. and those wasted seconds add up throughout the day.

And that's assuming we're comparing apples to apples, eg, CPUs of the same clock rating. If we remove that restriction, you could buy the cheapest Athlon 64 available and still get better .NET compiler performance than the fastest Pentium 4 available. That's cash in your pocket twice: once for the purchase of the less expensive CPU, and again as you spend less time writing the same code.

In another post he follows up with the following:

As a developer, you will not find a CPU that compiles code faster. In fact, it's not even close. So what are you waiting for? You'll certainly need something to counteract VS.NET 2005's higher system requirements.

Maybe with a Athalon 64 X2 4800+ CPU Visual Studio will finally compile as fast as Borland Delphi. . . . .

The 2005 version of Delphi is already out (with the 2006 version due about the same time as VS.NET 2005 I am guessing), and as has been observed it takes quite a while to load, especially compared to the lightening quick Delphi 7. But where I noticed another big difference is in runtime performance of the IDE. Delphi 2005 is much quicker for opening and closing projects and project groups then Visual Studio 2003 is for performing the same operation on projects and solutions. Frankly I spend a lot more time compiling, opening and editing my code then opening and closing the IDE, so I much prefer the spending the time once up front opening the Delphi 2005 IDE then spending it time after time with the Visual Studio .NET 2003 IDE.

So the real question is, will running Delphi on a Athalon 64 X2 4800+ CPU actually compile so fast that the program will compile before you finish writing it? I wouldn't be surprised.

Tags: [Programming] [Delphi] [CPU]