Differences between compiling and recompiling?

Question

Some Ides like Visual Studio have the options to compile and recompile the project, what is the difference between the two and what do they perform differently? And when each should be used?

Answer 1

If you’re talking about C# and VB.Net (I can’t say otherwise): the main difference is that the rebuild (recompile) makes a clean in the project and then make a build (compile).

As the build will check all files that have changed and try to compile only what has been modified. Rebuild will compile everything from scratch.

Answer 2

I imagine you’re talking about build and rebuild which is a little different from compiling and recompiling.

The exact semantics may vary and it is not so much the IDE, it is the project construction system that the IDE reproduces in GUI.

Building takes advantage of what you already have, it’s called incremental building. For example, everything it detects that it does not need to generate a new executable it does not generate. In general this is checked when the time of what was changed in the code and that the executable is with previous time, need to generate a new.

Rebuild starts everything from scratch as if nothing had been done with that before, which obviously takes longer, but avoids taking something that is already outdated.