Building for iOS has always been a bit of pain, but ever since Apple started demanding 64-bit support and I had to switch to IL2CPP and build for universal architecture, it’s become sooooo daaaamn sloooow. It easly takes half an hour for me to make a build in Unity, build that in XCode and run it. Before 64-bit it used to take 5 mins (which was annoying too, but with half an hour I feel about ready to shoot myself quit iOS development…)
What can I do? How can I make it faster? What is everyone else doing to handle this?
Are you using the latest patch release? It seems every patch release makes the builds times shorter and shorter. I also think Unity has said they’re working on optimizing build times next.
One of the reason why it’s a lot slower than mono is because it has way more source files to compile (we have somewhere around 500, where as with mono we needed to compile about 30).
don’t forget as well that it is by default building for two platforms (32 and 64 bit) unless you explicitly dis/enable them
so those 5 minutes mono builds would become at least 10, probably more, should it be used for 64bits
We are working on improving build times for iOS 64-bit builds. Our next step (which should be out in the next few patch releases) is to allow Xcode to do incremental builds, so the first build will be long, but subsequent builds should be faster, as fewer things change. It might take us a bit of iteration to get incremental code generation as optimal as possible, but we are definitely working on it so stay tuned.