Linux From Scratch
has an interesting way of measuring how long it takes to do things.
Since most of your time is going to be spent compiling C code,
everything is measured in
Standard Build Units (SBUs),
or the time it takes to build binutils.
At the time of writing,
the instructions are:
In short, grab binutils, unpack, configure, and compile (adjust -j to number of CPUs).
Dependencies include gcc, libc6-dev, texinfo...
(the configure step will fail if it's missing dependencies).
1$ curl -LO https://sourceware.org/pub/binutils/releases/binutils-2.41.tar.xz
2$ tar xvf binutils-2.41.tar.xz
3$ cd binutils-2.41
4$ mkdir build && cd build
5$ ../configure --disable-nls --enable-gprofng=no --disable-werror
6$ time make -j 16
On my Framework 13
with a 12th Gen Intel i7-1260P (16) @ 4.700GHz CPU,
running gcc version 13.2.1 20230801 (GCC) from Arch Linux,
1 SBU is make -j 16 181.20s user 24.22s system 607% cpu 33.802 total,
or 33 seconds wall clock time.
On my newly acquired
Lichee Pi 4A
with a TH1520, 12nm, RISC-V 2.0G C910 x4 CPU,
running gcc version 13.2.0 (Debian 13.2.0-4revyos1) from Debian / RevyOS,
1 SBU is make -j 4 953.23s user 197.58s system 322% cpu 5:56.51 total,
or 6 minutes of wall clock time.