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Some of the things I do:
- watch the (short) video I've been waiting to watch (eg from Smarter Every Day or She's Got Legs )
- solve a problem in another project (eg if there's an issue or just something I want to implement in one of my personal projects)
- check up on Twitter
You could also use the time to listen to a section of an audio book (eg from Audible) - I tend to use my Audible book time during commutes & garden work.
The trick is being able to find something that you can switch to for that time which doesn't run over or dramatically pull you out of the focus you need to complete your current task. If possible, as mentioned elsewhere, move on to the next task.
------------------------------------------------
If you say that getting the money
is the most important thing
You will spend your life
completely wasting your time
You will be doing things
you don't like doing
In order to go on living
That is, to go on doing things
you don't like doing
Which is stupid.
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"build time"?? emm... are you building on PC XT or use punched cards?  )
I use C# in VS2019, my "build time" barely exceeds 2-3 seconds. What I do during that priceless time? Oh, I can breath 1-2 times.
I'm absolutely serious and I still have no idea HOW you can build smth for minutes.
My rule: ONE current project + referenced DLLs. If I improve two projects - OK, both of 'em include in solution. But even in that case all compilation is quite quick to do smth else.
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My projects don't take that much time to build, mostly due to a lack of unit testing.
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I had one of the early laptops (by Olivetti) with twin floppy drives (no HD). I had the compiler and source code on one floppy, the libraries on another floppy. I had a long commute when I was travelling home for the weekend on the train, about four hours. The battery on the laptop would also last about four hours. I would edit my C++ code using Brief for a while, sometimes most of the trip, but sometimes I would want to test some small change so would have to do a build. A full build took just over three and a bit hours so I would just have time to do some editing, do a full build, run a couple of tests on the results, make TODO notes and shutdown just before the battery packed in, and then get off the train.
I would read a paperback book during the build - sometimes a whole one. Ah, the good old days!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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It was less build time than startup time - the app built in under a minute, but the open project dialog took a few minutes to load (pulling a zillion times more data from the DB to build fat models instead of the 3 or 4 columns from a single table needed for the list) followed by the detailed application model taking a few minutes to compute (overly complex model, and because it was time dependent and took a while to stabilize computing way more data than actually shown).
I ended up spending a few months trying to figure out how to build a Binder Clip Star[^] using a poor set of directions (the linked one at least shows which wire goes on the outside at all steps, but is missing anything about how you need to hold it at some steps to keep it from self-destructing halfway through).
Eventually we got out of crunch mode and I was able to look at things that weren't my assigned tasks (no one else cared that performance was a tire dump fire  ) and un-![Elephant | [mastadon]](https://codeproject.global.ssl.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/elephant.gif) ed the startup code, sped the main model calculation up by a factor of ~2x, and changed how it was used to not need computing huge amounts of data beyond the displayed range for something like 5-20x typical improvement; and got the compile to start testing my code changes cycle down to under a minute. It still took the model a few weeks to go from bogus starting values to a fully stable state; my not done before the contract ran out next step would've been to save daily snapshots of the model state in the DB to allow faster startup (saving the displayed per minute values would've exploded its size and ate the disk, so we had to recompute on load) by another factor of 5-10x at which point it wouldn't have any obnoxiously long "did it lock up?" pauses. 
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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If your builds are taking to long then just change over to a scripted language and build time drops to zero !
| Ravings en masse^ |
|---|
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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If compile time is an essential part of the build time, then you are making a program.
You are not making a software system composed of sevearal program components merged into a whole.
You are not making a software product with nasty elements such as documentation, test logs, ...
Or, maybe you are, but when you say "build time" you are not talking of building the software system product, but to "build" a linkable unit from a source file. Then you might see compiling filling a noticeable part of the build time. Maybe half a second out of two seconds build time ...
Last time I did a make clean, rebuilt the system from scratch, and inspected the last written timestamp on the compiled files, there were typically six to eight of them completed per second. (And last time I did this little exercise was around ten years ago; we've got faster machines today.)
Using compile time as an argument against compiled languages, in favor of interpreted ones, might have been valid in the 1980s. It is not today.
Besides: Because interpreted languages traditionally had lousy run time performance, all major interpreted languages today start the interpretation by doing an on-the-fly compilation... (if they do not find an already compiled version in a cache). So you don't escape the compile time - you just count it as part of the run time.
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First, you should learn to consider that someone might be joking. This is the lounge.
Secondly, when I think build I think of the entire thing. Compile and link.
If you use second-party libraries for much of your source the it will be much quicker than it really should be. Mostly, what I did I built from scratch. An exception to this was the .lib file that came with an A/D converter. For FORTRAN, years ago, I even built a graphics .lib I coded in Assembler. The whole thing, if I did it all at once, would be done in a minute, tops (on an 80286 w/HDD and 1 MB RAM).
Mostly, however, the libraries were compiled once and, with the exception of an occasional addition, left as they were. Compile/link took seconds, usually.
You need to get a grasp on context when commenting in the forum. Not every, and perhaps hardly anything, is taken seriously. Certainly not if there's an opening for a laugh. Maybe that long sunless winter's getting to you?
| Ravings en masse^ |
|---|
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Well, back when it was Turbo Pascal: Used the bathroom (took a book), got a cup of coffee, chatted up the receptionist (you could do that, then), checked the telex machine, read a bit of Byte magazine and then topped off my coffee again.
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Or Musk says: "Bitcoin too high!" ... and it tanks 10%.
But he's already made a Billion$ on it.
"I'm your puppet!"
It was only in wine that he laid down no limit for himself, but he did not allow himself to be confused by it.
― Confucian Analects: Rules of Confucius about his food
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Crazy, isn't it?
cheers
Chris Maunder
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If you substituted Unicorns for BTC, I wouldn't be able to tell you if it makes any difference; though the Unicorn is probably cuter ... but I guess that's what DoggieCoins are for.
It was only in wine that he laid down no limit for himself, but he did not allow himself to be confused by it.
― Confucian Analects: Rules of Confucius about his food
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Gerry Schmitz wrote: Or Musk says: "Bitcoin too high!" ... and it tanks 10%.
He's a monetary visionary to some. He influences decisions, but not the trend.
I just enjoy the vids' where he promises a tank and the glass breaks
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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He got involved with the GME short too. 
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He's a puppet master.
I hear Tesla is having quality problems ... but the BTC flip did better than the revenue from cars.
It was only in wine that he laid down no limit for himself, but he did not allow himself to be confused by it.
― Confucian Analects: Rules of Confucius about his food
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Gerry Schmitz wrote: I hear Tesla is having quality problems ...
Yeah, I read that a Model Y was driving down the highway and the roof came completely off the car. That's crazy.
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Seals of that kind is normally done by robots, so this indicates a serious problem.
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*headdesk*
I've been spending all day woolgathering on the subject of cooperative vs preemptive multitasking on microcontroller systems - particularly those with slow or absent JTAG support.
I saw your post and was like "oh goody! an excuse to nerd out with Daniel on the subject"
And then of course, it was something like Garfield. And now I'm got a cavalcade of observations about multitasking banging around in my noggin with nowhere to go.
Oh well, I should probably be working. 
Real programmers use butterflies
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Some microcontrollers do not have RTC support or any other kind of timer-like tick coming in so cooperation seems like the best option for them. I seem to remember an article or two here on that topic.
Yes, there are a few : Search Results[^]
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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I've also found that introducing multithreading into a system you already can't debug using a traditional debugger is a recipe for a nightmare in practice.
What I've done on this dual core monster I am working with is I keep exactly two threads - each with its own core affinity, and they basically do very little communication with each other, and all of their work is internally cooperatively multitasked.
It doesn't have an RTC per se, but like most CPUs it has a timing crystal connected so you can get the number of milliseconds since boot with it. I use that to make timers.
static uint32_t tickTS=0;
void loop() {
if(millis()-tickTS>=1000) {
tickTS=millis();
Serial.println("One second elapsed");
}
}
You can even wrap that to turn it into a callback. or whatever.
but i do all my cooperatively multithreaded code such that if i have to make a time delay for example, I use the above mechanism to avoid blocking. I do this on the code for each of the threads/cores.
Real programmers use butterflies
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I have a similar issue. I have a big bunch of code to debug that needs to run on a GPU. I have written it so it can also run on the CPU so I am doing all my initial debugging on the CPU and then I'll try it on the GPU. I have already tried small bits on the GPU and it looks good so far.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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I did something like that with my JSON(C++) library. I wrote it on a desktop and it made it work only to ultimately port it to run on devices as meager as 8-bits and 4kB of RAM.
To make things even more gonzo the entire thing is a port of a JSON parser I wrote in C#.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Reminds me of the main character in the novel "Barkefletteren" (1913) by Norwegian author Gabriel Scott, who remarks (not my translation!):
"Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits".
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