Very slow compile speeds on Windows using Visual Studio Express 2010

[TerryCavanagh]

I recently did a reinstall of my laptop, and found that making a clean release build on windows of my current project took around 25 minutes (not a typo!). I asked in the slack, and was told to try using Visual Studio Express 2013 instead, which I did! A clean release build of my game went back down to around 3 minutes.

The issue here is that openfl setup windows currently installs 2010, which is clearly much slower than 2013. Maybe the script could be updated?

If that's not possible, perhaps this page could be updated to tell people about this problem, and suggest using 2013 instead?

[MSGhero]

When you downloaded VSE13, was it through Microsoft's (free) windows dev subscription page? '10 was only about 200mb, but '13 is seeming like a big download, plus it took a while to find.

"Visual Studio Express 2013 for Windows with Update 5"

[TerryCavanagh]

I honestly don't remember where I downloaded it from when I did it, but after looking around a bit this seems to be a link to the webinstaller, and it's on a microsoft site:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/2/E/72E0F986-D247-4289-B9DC-C4FB07374894/wdexpress_full.exe

[TerryCavanagh]

(also found this: http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/2/E/72E0F986-D247-4289-B9DC-C4FB07374894/wdexpress_full.exe)

[Beeblerox]

@MSGhero i'm using the version you've mentioned. It's big (more than 5Gb), but compilation got much faster with it

[MSGhero]

@Beeblerox yeah I installed the big one. That version shouldn't be in the openfl setup windows script though because it took a long time to install for me.

[TerryCavanagh]

The web download version is only a megabyte! I don't think you need the entire 5gb iso.

I'm not sure which version should be installed by default, but SOMETHING should probably tell you that there's a 10x difference in speed between the two versions - either a help page, the setup script, or something else.

[MSGhero]

Oh for sure. Maybe without the 5 updates, it's much leaner. I doubt the setup command includes any updates in the download.

[MSGhero]

Oh man, "VSE 2013 for Windows" was the wrong download, I couldn't compile at all. "VSE 2013 for Windows Desktop" is correct, and that's what @TerryCavanagh 's link is for.

The install link is within Lime. It might just be a matter of replacing this link with yours: https://github.com/openfl/lime/blob/develop/tools/utils/PlatformSetup.hx#L62 It wasn't a fast download and install like VSE 10 is, but cpp compiles not taking a half hour is pretty good.

[jgranick]

I believe Visual Studio 2017 is supported in development builds of HXCPP, but I believe I use VS 2015 Community Edition personally