The fact that it takes 1.5 hours on essentially an early 2000s supercomputer cluster full steam ahead to compile a fancy HTML viewer with integrated lightweight Java-like mini script language is bonkers.

You may be under-appreciating just how fancy this thing is.

I wonder how long does Java (which actually has a standard library, unlike JavaScript) take to compile? Would be an interesting comparison.

Far less on my machine. I think 1 hour?

Here with Ryzen 5700G, it takes almost 2.5 hours to compile chromium (doing one at the moment). This is with /var/tmp/portage mounted on tmpfs.

I have a 3900, no X, and 32 GB of RAM. I used to use a tmpfs, but I found that the build would run out of memory.

What if you try to compile in similar way than here? https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=ungoo...

Edit: Also, 3900 is 3900X running on eco mode (same spec but half power). You might get a lot more performance by tuning BIOS settings.

I'm not going to try to compile by hand, unfortunately. <shudder>

I'll take a peek at the BIOS, but I'll also no good at doing such things.

Do you have to do the make clean all, or equivalent, every time? Chrome has a ton of bits and bobs built in, right? Not all of which need to be updated every time (I guess?).

I wonder how it compares to the build time of something with equivalent functionality, like firefox.