Pystd, similar-ish functionality with a fraction of the compile time

6 days ago

The author discusses Pystd, a from-scratch written standard library for C++ designed to improve compilation times, which is not an implementation of the ISO specification.
C++ compilation is significantly slower than C, with a 'hello world' program taking up to 2.3 seconds in C++ compared to 0.02 seconds in C, a slowdown of about 100x.
The slowdown is attributed to the standard library implementation, where including headers like <vector> expands to around 29,000 lines of preprocessed code, increasing compile times.
Pystd's design priorities are compilation time, simplicity of implementation, and performance, aiming to reduce build times with a requirement that any header compile within 0.15 seconds.
Pystd currently has 6,500 lines of headers and 5,600 lines of source code, offering functionality such as containers (vector, hash maps), algorithms, smart pointers, and utilities similar to Python modules.
Adopting Pystd led to an 80% reduction in compile times, up to 75% reduction in unstripped binary size, and a 25% improvement in runtime performance for the CapyPDF library.
The project includes a performance test script to enforce compile time limits, even on slower hardware like a Raspberry Pi, and supports Linux and macOS but not MSVC due to missing compiler features.
Lack of documentation is acknowledged; the author suggests using AI tools for generating docs but avoids including AI-generated content in the repo for ethical reasons.

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