Visual Studio 2005 C++ Compiler slower that Visual Studio 6 Compiler?

Question

One of our old C++ projects is still with Visual Studio 6. Once a year I try to convert it in to a higher Visual Studio Version but it's not easy because not all the code is written by us. Anyway, I finally succeeded in converting the project to VS2005 after fixing a few hundred lines of code. But compiling the projects takes a very long time! Much longer than in VS6.

Some classes have a lot of codelines, a few thousands even. These are just arrays to be filled in the code with a lot of items. I know it's not the perfect solution but this is how it is at the moment and VS6 never had a problem with that.

Maybe there are just some settings I have to adjust to speed things up but if it stays like it is now I will keep it as an VS6 project since I don't want to sit at my desk all day doing nothing.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Sounds like you are a few years behind in your "once-a-year-upgrade", no?

Check to make sure you didn't turn off pre-compiled headers.

Answer 2

Get Incredibuild.

Definitely worth the money you pay for it.
What it does is delegate compilation of files to idle build "agents" on the network, get the results back and link it on the build co-ordinator. The more machines the better. I was impressed with the reduction of build time.

Answer 3

Differences in compile times are normal. The C++ compiler from VS2005 is significantly more compliant to standard C++ than VC6 was. There is a huge difference between these two compilers.

Answer 4

See if you can find the smallest modules that compile quickly, and very slowly in VS05, and see what they don't have in common. Add in the elements from the slow module to the fast one until you get a sudden slowdown. That is the cause of the problem.

Answer 5

VS2005 produces more optimized code and thus has to spend extra time figuring out how to make it faster.