> What exactly are all of you people doing with your laptops?

C/C++ project builds. Losing two cores just about doubles build times, and template-heavy C++ code makes the compiler want gigs of RAM all to itself. In principle I should do this on a desktop or server, but IT isn't on board with that.

I have to agree with the other poster on this. I only full compile once in the beginning and once at the end. Every other time, I just recompile the changed part and rebuild it with the unchanged object files.

But if you're talking about packages from source, then I agree. It's the one thing that sometimes makes me question whether or not I should upgrade. But, after a full night of compiling Qt5 from source, that lingering doubt usually vanishes.

Do you do full recompilations all the time? Don't you use incremental builds? If yes, the compilation time should only rarely be a problem. But reading people's comments I feel like there are many projects out there using a shell script like "gcc -c a.cpp; gcc -c b.cpp; ...; gcc -o prog *.o" out there.

Changing something closer to the root of a large dependency tree triggers a lot of recompilation. The lack of real modules and reliance of `#include` in C++ makes dependency graphs larger than they could be.

Not necessarily. Say I'm editing "bob.cc", and in the mean time edited "common.h" #included by many many files. While I'm editing "bob.cc", there is no need for me to rebuild the entire project until I want to see how it links to everything else (which can be postponed quite a bit if you have some tests); so I either run "make bob.cc" or "make test_bob.cc && ./test_bob". I don't know much C++ and all this is theoretical, but I think this is the ideal workflow with C/C++ development, and this is why incremental builds are useful, especially if the code is nicely separated into testable units.

Not full recompilations, but when we're working on a feature release, switching git branches routinely requires a lot of files to be rebuilt due to header changes.

ccache is your friend.

When you use templates, recompiling a single file can take ten minutes.

Is there an open source project where I can test this? I don't know much about C++ (I know some C), and would like to see this for myself.

Why are you using a fancy 2.8Ghz dual-core machine when you could be using a netbook from 2008 with a 1.6Ghz Atom and 512MB of RAM?

Is it that strange that people have different use cases from you? Plenty of things peg the CPU at 100% for extended periods of time: video encodes, 3D renders, building code, slicing for 3D printers, etc. Certainly I could do my work on a dual core machine, and I did until a few months ago, but there are competing machines that are cheaper and offer twice the performance. Why would you not want a quad core CPU when they are the exact same price as the old dual core models?

At my webdev gig last year I used a 2008 24" iMac with a Core2 Duo and 4gb of RAM and it worked perfectly once I put in a request for a 250gb SSD. The only time it choked up was using ImageOptim on a ton of images, and that could always be offloaded to a server. I think computers are lasting a lot longer than they used to.

I usualy work with at least 8gb RAM.

Linux is not very demanding of memory, but sometimes, I have to maintain legacy code writen in C#, so I use virtualbox with win7, visual studio, with is demanding for the memory.

Outside that, 4gb is survivable using Linux.