Minecraft’s WSL build time cut in half after working with Visual Studio C++ team

Sinem Akinci

The Minecraft Publishing team, within Mojang Studios, reached out to the Visual Studio C++ team because they needed to expand C++ development to a new platform (Linux) while respecting their existing technological base (MSBuild) and these constraints prevented them from pursuing more established cross-platform pipelines. When developing with these technical constraints, they were experiencing issues with extremely slow full rebuild times on WSL (40-50 minutes!) and remote Linux systems with MSBuild.  For reference, the same rebuild would take around 20 minutes for Windows. The Visual Studio C++ team met with them extensively to identify the issues and develop solutions that fit these constraints, and ultimately this made a huge difference, with all build times reduced by 50% and matching the performance of other platforms they develop for.  

Minecraft Legends artwork

After receiving the updates and adapting our workflows, our experience developing for Linux with Visual Studio is as pleasant and as performant as any of their other platforms. Initial configuration is now minimal and once it’s set up, everything works as expected. Being able to develop for multiple platforms using the same tools and build configuration is a huge win, certainly better than maintaining a separate build system for Linux.” – Isaac Dayton, from the Minecraft Legends team

To learn more about this experience from Isaac Dayton from the Minecraft team, please read the full story at: aka.ms/minecraft-success-story.

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1 comment

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  • iain clarke 0

    Obviously we can’t see their projects / solutions, but is it possible to download a Hello World version? Ideally with a list of Linux packages to install at the other end?

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