Partial link in MS Visual Studio?

I am trying to reduce link time when building a large C++ application in MS Visual Studio 2005. My link time is currently 7 to 100 seconds, usually closer to 7 (but it seems to depend on luck).

My application consists of about 20 static libraries, one of which is large, rarely changes and depends on a large third-party library, which is not used by any of my other libs. I think it is a classic case where partial link will improve build times. By "partial link" i mean whatever ld -r does on Linux.

Is "part开发者_高级运维ial link" possible with MS Visual Studio? I didn't find it in their documentation, but maybe they call it a different name, or maybe it's a hidden feature.

Does my speculation on partial link make sense? Is there really a chance it will help me?

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Is linking incrementally via the /INCREMENTAL switch what you are looking for?

One other thing you can do is to go through an extra level of indirection: Wrap the static libs into a DLL and expose whatever is used by the application via the DLL. That DLL could then be built fairly infrequently and linking with it may be far less expensive.

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This may seem trivial, but the solution in my case was using a module definition file (foo.def). The file format specification by Microsoft implies that it should be used only for DLL files, but it works perfectly well for static libraries too so i had to change my library into a DLL.

This reduced my minimal link time from 7 to 2 seconds (probably helped the average link time too).