How best to alleviate scenarios that trigger non-incremental linking (MSVS)

Question

While incremental linking addresses much of the time spent linking, even for very large projects, I find the incremental linker in MSVS to be pretty haphazard. (I'm currently using 2003 atm, would love to hear if 2005/8 addressed any of this.) My list of known triggers include:

• changing anything external to the main .exe project will trigger a full link
• adding static variables had a 50% chance of triggering a full link

and this list is certainly not inclusive. What can I do to avoid full links?

So far, the only diagnosis tool i've found so far is

• /test in the linker command line options

and it's terrible. What solutions are out there for diagnosing triggers for full re-links?

Answer 1

Minimizing the number of projects in your solution makes the problem a little better. And of course all the normal build speed-ups will work, like reducing includes and shrinking obj files size.

Answer 2

I'm using 2008; and while I have only used it for small->medium sized projects, so far I haven't experienced any unexpected full links.

I haven't used 03, but in my opinion 08 seems to be far better then 05.