Originally posted here by progme


No not all but if you go and work at any software house that produces software of any reasonable size it will. I can't think of one project that I've worked on in the last four years that wasn't compiled overnight. This is just my experience though working on industry strength software.
Define "reasonable size". A program doesn't have to require overnight compilation to be considered industrial strength software.

Sure I remember quake, I also remember the days when there wasn't parallel processing and all graphics rendering was done in software on the CPU.
Most PCs today only have one CPU, so parallel processing still isn't an option for the fast majority of people.

And I wasn't saying that speed is the most important factor in programming any more, but it is certainly not a petty one as you stated it to be.