Compilation process is funny in Quartus II

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Somewhere in the compiler settings you will find the option of "turn smart compilation on" and it "smartly" escapes initial stages but probably not fitting stage.

3 hours, more or less depends on the project size, fitting and timing closure, your PC etc so varies a lot and my personal experience is that xilinx ISE clutter of tools is slower than the compact quartus (plus now Timequest cluttered out) while SysGen is extremely slower than DSPBuilder (just to be fair).

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Kaz, thank you very much for your reply. The options you mention were already turned on, but they did not solve this little problem. I also tried to turn on the "Rapid recompile" feature, but no results either. It is like if Quartus II automatically discarded previous compilation results that were created before the beginning of the current session (i.e., before the starting time of the application). But this is just a conjecture, I have never put my nose on the very internal design of Q2.

Regarding the compilation time, let me say that my intention was not to complain about it, but only to highlight that this problem is a bit annoying (think about 3h of compilation at the end of the day, and three extra hours more the next morning just as a "punishment" for closing the application...). And the reference to the competitor's tools was more a reference to the option "force process up-to-date" that makes the Xilinx's ISE environment accept the last compilation results as valid and up-to date (though you have to manage it carefully, the results can be wrong if you made some changes on the design, obviously). Do you know a (command-line?) trick to achieve the same results in Quartus II? Or at least an alternative method to launch the assembler over the last fitting results without having to go back to the start if the application was closed.

Well, finally I don't want to enter into an argument about which design tools are the best; as you say, there are many variables that influence the compilation time and the productivity you get, including your pc's performance and your skills, but all that stuff is far way away from my question here. Anyway, I agree with you in one point: I firmly believe Timequest is lightyears ahead other timing analyzers.

Again, thank you for your reply.