alt Hacker NewsI hate compiling. 9/10 something goes wrong. Sometimes I can fix it, other times I just abandon the effort and use something else. These days I just use packages or docker images and if that doesn't work out I'm moving on, ain't nobody got time for this. You really can't expect people who just want to use their computers and don't even know what a compiler is to get involved in a process like that.
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The idea is that software would only be shipped if it actually works, and part of this would be ensuring it compiles. I'm not suggesting we use Make files or some other foul approach like that. Code should ideally be distributed as a single zip file with an executable header that triggers it to be unpacked in some cache directory by a program analogous to the linker, and compiled by the simple process of compiling all source files. Additionally this could be sped up drastically by having the compiler be a single executable with uniform flags across files. Header files could be parsed once and shared between build threads in parallel, which alone would safe much work on the part of the compiler. If this still proves insufficient, a language with superior semantics to C could be chosen which can be compiled faster. Most code these days shipped is JS which is compiled on the user's computer. This would be an order of magnitude improvement on that from a performance perspective.
No, end users need not get involved, it could/should be handled by the operating system.