I wish more tech outlets knew about benchmarking developer workloads, Chromium compile time is such an irrelevant benchmark. Benchmarking the time to make a clean release build of an incredibly large C++ code base, especially one with tons of time dedicated to making the build as parallel as possible, isn’t at all representative of what 99% of programmers do in their day to day. I work on a large cpp codebase every day and it’s been months since I’ve done a clean release build on my local machine.

A substantially better test methodology would be to checkout to a commit 30 or so back, do a clean build and running of the test suite to populate caches, and then time the total duration it takes to run the test suite until you land back on the latest commit. Most programmers don’t do clean builds unless they absolutely have to and they’ll have build caches populated. Do this for an array of languages with projects of varying sizes and then you’ll have a benchmark actually worth looking at.

Best way to make money during a gold rush is to sell shovels.