[lugg]

Those are all valid trade offs, but its ignoring the issue raised in the AP.

Like, is an environment like this encouraging bad habbits?

But anyway..

Special hardware: such as? Very few systems can't be downscaled. Situations where you need this special hardware we are talking horizontal multi server setups anyway.

Special workspaces: be less special, improve tooling, improve build operations. Very few setups actually needs centralised configuration.

Large compilations: I'm not sold that a) there is many people with the justifiable need, and b) any real justifiable need is likely going to want on demand autoscaling of the compilation servers, i.e. development won't be local anyway.

I'm not trying to debunk everything you've said. It's a trade off and I've used central dev databases in the past for legacy systems and it worked well for those in the office.

All I can tell you is that iteration speed, testability of code, manual testing and all around team morale was DRASTICALLY improved by stubbing out that bottleneck in newer systems.

[shaklee3]

I'm speaking for my individual case and others I work with where we have codebases of over a million lines of c++, with many header-only libraries. On an 80-core server make -j can still take 3-4 minutes, and that uses all the resources on the machine. Trust me, I wish I could have something as fast that's not centralized. The closest I can think of is either a VM (slow/wasteful), or a container. The container would be really easy if everyone used vscode with the container development plugin, but not everyone on the team does.

For those that don't, it's much more friction to remember to start it up, etc.