aws-cdk-lib: incremental build takes a few minutes every time

[tmokmss]

Describe the bug

As a CDK contributor, when using yarn watch in the aws-cdk-lib directory, it takes about 3 minutes to build ts files incrementally, resulting in bad developer experience.

Please let us know if there are better ways other than yarn watch for faster development iteration (write->build->test) 😃

Expected Behavior

Incremental build should finish in a few seconds, which was achieved in the previous package structure.

Current Behavior

Incremental build takes a few minutes.

Reproduction Steps

cd packages/aws-cdk-lib
yarn watch
# change some file and trigger an incremental build

Possible Solution

I'm not sure why it is so slow yet. Just creating this issue for visibility.

Maybe the package is just very large and we need to split it into multiple ones (like the previous structure). c.f. tsc doc.

Or maybe we can use faster compiler (without type check) like esbuild as an alternative for local development.

Additional Information/Context

yarn watch on framework-integ also takes 10 to 20 seconds on every incremental build. It is acceptable for now but will possibly raise a similar problem in the future.

CDK CLI Version

2.76.0

Framework Version

No response

Node.js Version

v18.13.0

OS

macOS

Language

Typescript

Language Version

No response

Other information

No response

[pahud]

Yes I agree we need to improve this. Thank you for the report.

[pahud]

related to #25196

[MrArnoldPalmer]

Hey, working on some optimizations now. For now I would recommend using npx tsc --watch for MOST workflows as it's significantly faster (on my machine less than 10 seconds between compiles). There are some tests that rely on transforms that JSII provides but they are pretty niche so most people won't need them.

[ashishdhingra]

@tmokmss Closing this issue since the related issue #25196 is now closed. Feel free to reopen in case this issue still needs traction.

[github-actions]

⚠️COMMENT VISIBILITY WARNING⚠️

Comments on closed issues are hard for our team to see.
If you need more assistance, please either tag a team member or open a new issue that references this one.
If you wish to keep having a conversation with other community members under this issue feel free to do so.