AOSP build being so resource demanding is frustrating - can we optimize?

[asquator]

Hello,

I'm new to AOSP and I have just completed the building process. It was not easy to do it even on a pretty strong PC that handles all the [heavy] development tasks I have. For the first time I had to create a swapfile of 32G in addition to my 16G ram so the build process doesn't crash. I'm not even talking about the 250G+ (!!!) it now takes on my disk. The compilation itself was pretty quick, but the Soong scanning is really a serial RAM killer. Does it load the entire dependency graph into memory? Or why is the consumption so high?

I've seen the minimal resource requirements on the docs page, and it makes me sad. Is it a techonogical limit we bumped into, the one that can't be shifted, or is it a lack of optimizations? There is no way to tell Soong to consume less memory and cache on disk, except swap or memory compression. And it's still not clear to me why the build eats so much disk space - no way Android itself is that heavy.

I'm probably missing a lot of things as a newcomer, and I'd be happy to get some directions to relevant sources that explain why the build should be such a pain (should it?). Are there any plans to optimize it in the future? Again, the sole idea of having such high requirements just looks wrong to me... Seen many similar posts in the past, but I don't think any of them got enough of community attention.

Thank you!