How do I get Windows to go as fast as Linux for compiling C++?

Question

I know this is not so much a programming question but it is relevant.

I work on a fairly large cross platform project. On Windows I use VC++ 2008. On Linux I use gcc

Answer 1

Incremental linking

If the VC 2008 solution is set up as multiple projects with .lib outputs, you need to set "Use Library Dependency Inputs"; this makes the linker link directly against the .obj files rather than the .lib. (And actually makes it incrementally link.)

Directory traversal performance

It's a bit unfair to compare directory crawling on the original machine with crawling a newly created directory with the same files on another machine. If you want an equivalent test, you should probably make another copy of the directory on the source machine. (It may still be slow, but that could be due to any number of things: disk fragmentation, short file names, background services, etc.) Although I think the perf issues for dir /s have more to do with writing the output than measuring actual file traversal performance. Even dir /s /b > nul is slow on my machine with a huge directory.