So, this is no long and insightful write-up, but I still think it’s worth writing a few words about and submitting here.

I recently needed to compile Chromium for work. Chromium has a total of 76924 C and C++ files. A single complete compile, with 32-bit ARM as the target architecture, on a build server with an 8 core/16 thread Xeon E5-2660 and a ton of memory and no other CPU intensive task running, takes almost 6 and a half hours. That means it’s compiling at the speed of ~3.2 files per second.

Compiling the entire Linux kernel for ARM though, from http://github.com/raspberrypi/linux, takes around 5 and a half minutes.