make building faster in VS

[a-teammate]

Currently - at least in visual studio - it takes more than 15 min to clone and build inexor (see e.g. https://ci.appveyor.com/project/inexor-game/code/build/0.1191).

There are several reasons for it:

We use CMake, which doesn't generate projects as effective as possible. And maybe we're additionally using it wrong.

We have a giantific prebuilts repo including our dependencies not only for Visual Studio but also some prebuilt libraries for linux which aren't in package managers. This takes hours to clone + it is hard to maintain.

We have a reflection prepass generating our networking code based on an easier interface. This is currently using libclang internally and hence actually almost means currently to parse the code twice (and it seems libclang is the wrong thing for this or we use it wrong, since it takes almost as long as a normal rebuild).

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Some random solution possibilities for anyone approaching these tasks:

• hunter
  • a seemingly pretty good package manager, found the link here:
  • found the link here: http://thetoeb.de/2015/02/04/heterogeneous-package-search-retrieval-cmake/
  • This could also mean "effortless" OSX support!
• GYP (possible alternative to CMake developed by Google to have faster builds for chrome)
• meson
  • a seemingly pretty fast and strong meta build system (alternative to CMake)
  • including even a dependency managment solution (Wuha!)
• optimize our build configuration files
  • our current ones have been redone from scratch
  • we could compare the output when we autogenerate build files from the pretty fast Sauerbraten vs-solution
  • tools: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6649606/how-to-support-both-vcxproj-to-cmake-on-a-project

Goals:

• [x] Bring "git clone time" down by removing the bloat in the platform submodule (the prebuilts repo)
• [ ] Bring build time down to less then 3 minutes for the complete project (raw build time)
• [x] Replace LibClang with something else in our reflection prepass tool

[Croydon]

If you meant with complete build time the entire project with all deps, it is absolutely impossible.

If you meant in 3 minutes only Inexor itself, without deps, then I have to ask in what enviornment do you want to test that?

The rest is done.

[a-teammate]

I think we could close this issue when we made https://github.com/sakra/cotire work in Inexor.

Currently it breaks the build. Dunno how to change that, but I haven't looked into it too deeply..

But you are right, the rest of the issue seems done :)