2016 LLVM Developers’ Meeting: D. Dunbar “A New Architecture for Building Software”

Is this like llbuild? ▶ this video link I remember watching the talk awhile ago, but haven't kept up with its progress. It's about using LLVM as a library to eliminate duplicate work, as far as I remember. I think it was for C++ as well as Swift.

link may be too low-level for what you envision, but captures a lot of your ideas, I think. link has a presentation. It focuses on compiling with clang, but the system is more flexible. Slides at link , matching video is at ▶ this video .

If you are on Windows, VS 2015 and the upcoming VS 2016 have lots of improvements regarding compile times. link link link Apple is also doing a similar work regarding incremental C and C++ builds, based on the work they did for Swift ▶ this video C++ builds can be made bearable if you don't go crazy with template meta-programming, do forward declarations, only expose actually public data on the headers, instantiate most use templates. But specially do use binary libraries, even across application modules. Don't spend endless time recompiling code that doesn't change.