Why isn't ccache used with gcc more often?

Question

I've been wondering...

Are there some limitations with ccache?

If the difference in later compile times are so large, why aren't more Linux developers using ccache more often?

Answer 1

I guess that the simple answer is that ccache is great when the build system is broken (i.e. the dependencies are not correctly tracked, and to get everything built correctly you might need make clean; make). On the other hand, if dependencies are correctly tracked, then ccache will not yield any advantage over plain make, and will actually incur the cost of maintaining the cache and updating it (the size of the cache might be huge depending on the size of the project)