Speeding up ESP32 compiling process

Projects Programming
1

I recently started programming ESP32 using Arduino tools and Visual Micro with Visual Studio Community 2019. My build times for a relatively simple sketch were around 8 minutes. Totally unacceptable, takes half a day to tweak anything. I have traced part of the problem to real-time protection from Avira, you think it would learn after a while that VS is not a threat but, no I had to manually exclude everything ESP32 related.

So it went from 8 minutes just to 2 minutes. Then I noticed I had option set in Visual Micro for library deep search, after disabling it, the compile failed on not being able to find libraries, and a lot of them, as ESP32 uses A LOT of code. So I added missing libraries manually with AddLibrary option for Current Platform, ended up with a long list of includes (23), mostly WiFi stuff. And...

What do you know it takes only 20 seconds now!!! I'll tell you what, yes, it is annoying to add all required libraries manually, but I will do this any time to get 20 sec compile times.

2

Regarding deep search of libraries - it need time only at first compilation. After the main set of libs were precompiled, all next builds will be much faster.

But anyway the fast modern SSD drive is strongly recommended :slight_smile:

3

I have SSD and max RAM, the laptop is a little old but it has 4 core Intel and can handle a large code base. You are right, it should have compiled all ESP32 libraries once but something is not working right in that option for me so explicit includes win.

4

8 minutes !
I would have joined the clergy within that time !

5

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