Incremental build for faster developing

[Wheest]

I am making changes to the internals of the C++ code, and want to quickly test my changes. How can I do this without running a full rebuild, which pip install . does.

[youben11]

True that not everything need to be rebuilt in order to test a small change, however, the way the python installation works, AFAIK, creates a temporary directory which will be deleted at the end, so no caching on intermediate objects. I can't recall if we had a workaround, but if it can be integrated as a dev tool, it would be great.

[bcebere]

Hello,

You can run

python setup.py bdist_wheel -d <build dir>
pip install <build dir>/<name>.whl

bdist_wheel step should reuse the cache on multiple runs.