STM32CubeIDE not doing incremental builds

[Lars Beiderbecke]

When I change a simple .c file and build the project, STM32CubeIDE always compiles all the files, including the unchanged ones. And there is no dependency between that one .c file and everything else.

Again, I didn't experience this behavior with TrueSTUDIO.

Which settings should I check to enable incremental builds with STM32CubeIDE?

[TDK]

There's not really a setting that controls this. Builds are makefile based and "make all" will do an incremental build when possible. That is the default behavior.

This is Eclipse behavior, not anything STM32CubeIDE specific.

[Pavel A. · Accepted solution]

Usually incremental build works. If not, one reason may be some file time set to far future.

Also try to use the internal builder.

[Lars Beiderbecke]

Thanks, Pavel! Changing the build from "external" to "internal" did activate the incremental build.

[Lars Beiderbecke]

Hm, there is only one problem: With internal builds, I no longer get the "used bytes" information, like this:

   text	   data	    bss	    dec	    hex	filename
  90284	  17816	  71924	 180024	  2bf38	proj.elf

Is there a way to get incremental builds with the external builder? Or that information with the internal builder?

[Pavel A.]

This is a known issue with the internal builder. Already reported.

Hope ST will fix it. Meanwhile you can add a post-build script to print this info, convert to bin or whatever else.

[Lars Beiderbecke]

That's great news! I guess I'll revert to external build for now, since it's actually very fast on my machine.