Compiling from terminal takes a long time

Programming
1

Feeling a bit adventurous so I wanted to try and compile a sketch from the terminal.

Followed Kaleidoscope/README.md at master · keyboardio/Kaleidoscope · GitHub almost completely. Differences were: using WSL on Windows. Directories were a little different; the git repo were under /mnt/c/Users/

Doing ‘make compile’ takes an obscene amount of time. I didn’t time it, but over an hour I would guess. Resolving libraries especially took a long time.

Well, ok, some code just takes a long time compiling… but then I ran ‘make flash’ not sure it would work with the usb/serial under WSL, but only one way to find out. It starts with the whole resolving libraries again!!! I must be doing something wrong. I shouldn’t have to wait more than an hour every time I want to compile or flash.

Any ideas?

2

I’m by no means an expert here, but compiling definitely didn’t take that long under native Linux. It took under 5min IIRC, certainly under 10.

3

This is an WSL2 issue. WSL2 has a know performance issue when working with files mounted on /mnt, for the details see this issue [wsl2] filesystem performance is much slower than wsl1 in /mnt · Issue #4197 · microsoft/WSL · GitHub
The ticket was open 4 years ago and is still not resolved!

If you want to speed up the compile time you need to clone the repo into the WSL home folder e.g.
cd ~
git clone xxxx
and then compile the firmware

If you also wants to flash the keyboard from WSL you need to look into usb passthrough for WSL, here is a link to an MS guide Connect USB devices | Microsoft Learn

Just be aware that if you are running Windows 10 it can be a bit of a hassle, supposedly it should be better under Windows 11.

If you want to compile and flash from a Windows terminal, I suggest you look into using the arduino-cli for Windows, last time I used it for compiling and flashing my keyboard, it was quite easy getting to work.

4

Thanks. That makes some sense. I will try that.