[balddenimhero]

Similar to the experiences of other commenters, I find the LaTeX edit-compile-review cycle to only grow unreasonably slow when none of the incremental compilation features are used. For larger documents I recommend (i) splitting the document to leverage the \include and \includeonly commands, and (ii) using the Tikz library "external" to avoid the unnecessary recompilation of unchanged graphics. PGF/TikZ is often a bottleneck.

I agree though that it would be nice if the compilation (esp. from scratch) were generally faster.

[gnatolf]

Still even using all of that, my thesis with heavy inline tikz took about 5 minutes per run (about 120 pages). And a full rerun with all tikz graphs redone (about 20), it took just shy of 20 minutes if the indexes existed already. That was all on a surface 4 pro from ~2015.

[yakubin]

Wow. That's competing with some C++ projects.

[41b696ef1113]

The number one reason to lean heavily on sectioning via \include is for debugging. Debugging Latex is a disaster, and it is only by compartmentalizing code into smaller sections do you have a hope of isolating the problem.