For any sizeable project, Go compilation time is just soooo long. Sometimes a build can take upwards of 10 seconds! But you can cut that time down.

This is a plugin for GPM that runs a go build on all of your dependencies in the $GOPATH. If you are using a per-project $GOPATH (the standard way of using GVP) then prebuilding is a simple way of improving performance.

Run make install. This will hopefully be in the GPM plugin homebrew repository soon, too.

Typically this is run right after a gpm install

$ cd my_go_project
$ source gvp in
$ gpm install
$ gpm prebuild
# And edit away!

If you also use gpm-git, you can prebuild those dependencies with gpm prebuild git.

If at any point you need to get rid of those pesky .a files, just do a gpm prebuild clean.

While Go really does build very quickly, there are practical cases where increasing compilation speed is desireable.

Here's what prompted me to write this plugin: I use vim with syntax checking. My syntax checker runs each time I write (:w, etc) the file. And I save often. On a sizeable project, I had to wait several seconds between when I hit :w and when my editor became active again.

The cause of this is that a few of my dependency libraries are very, very large, and were being re-compiled from scratch with each document save.

The solution: Prebuild the packages. This cut my go build time down to the point where I don't notice any lag.