Incremental builds are slower than in Xcode

[wojciech-kulik]

If you wonder why there is a couple of seconds difference between incremental builds in Xcode and Neovim:

xcodebuild does a lot of work which building inside of Xcode doesn't need to do. For example, loading Xcode's libraries and plugins, and loading the workspace, or project from disk. All of that has already been done inside the IDE when you hit Build. Large workspaces can take a significant amount of time to load. From your timings, our guess is that your project is large and takes 3-10s to load.

You can get some idea of where that time is going by passing -CommandLineBuildTimingLogLevel=2 to xcodebuild, which will dump a summary breakdown of where the time was spent at the end of the build. Everything before the "Build Actions" section is work that isn't performed when building inside the IDE.

For comparison, you could launch Xcode from Terminal via /Xcode.app/Contents/MacOS/Xcode -IDEBuildOperationTimingLogLevel=2 and do a build and a similar log will be dumped to the Terminal session.

This is the official answer from Apple to my ticket :).

[wojciech-kulik]

It turns out that the actual issue is with the signing process which is significantly slower when using xcodebuild because it calls multiple endpoints and it takes over 20 seconds.

Here you will find more details and a workaround: #201