I'm the current SCons project Co-Manager. Nice to see spirited conversation.
A couple data points on performance. A current snapshot of MongoDB's repo will do a null incremental build in 53 seconds on my i7-2600 with non-ssd drive. (Null incremental build = fully built tree. no need to rebuild anything).
In the last few releases we knocked that down from about 63 seconds.
Currently we're working on a number of performance related items and hope to make some strides here.
A couple data points on performance. A current snapshot of MongoDB's repo will do a null incremental build in 53 seconds on my i7-2600 with non-ssd drive. (Null incremental build = fully built tree. no need to rebuild anything).
In the last few releases we knocked that down from about 63 seconds.
Currently we're working on a number of performance related items and hope to make some strides here.
Note the article sited is fairly old: https://github.com/scons/scons/wiki/WhySconsIsNotSlow (from before 2.4).
That said there are (currently) faster build systems. SCons tends to be most valuable when the build is complicated.
So as you can see.. the current maintainers don't argue that there are no performance issues with SCons. But we're working on them.