Is it possible to write code that will cause long compile times?

Question

I'm working on our continuous integration system, and I'm interested in simulating our systems handling of unexpectedly long compile times. Is there any way to cause the compilation to take a long time to complete? Or perhaps force it into some sort of loop that would take a large amount of time to compile? I'm looking for something as easy as Thread.Sleep() only on the compilation rather than the execution.

How about using preprocessor directives?

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Here's an MSBuild sleep task that should do the trick. Call it from BeforeBuild target in your .csproj file, or wherever is appropriate for your need.

MSBuild Community Tasks also has a Sleep task, so go with that if you need to use some of their other tasks, which I've found very useful.

Answer 2

Obviously the Sleep task is the way to go. But if you are interested in ways of making the C# compiler take arbitrarily long, FYI it is possible to encode problems in the source code which force the overload resolution algorithm to execute an O(n^m) algorithm. Choose n and m large enough and you can make the compiler do as much work as you like.

Here's my article on that subject if you're interested.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2007/03/28/lambda-expressions-vs-anonymous-methods-part-five.aspx

Answer 3

I had a coworker once who wrote a 16,000 line switch statement. It took forever to compile, and then when he expanded it a bit more it actually broke the compiler. Somehow I'm not sure that's what you had in mind, though.