My current project has ~2MB of generated assembly files worth of this kind of stuff and they assemble "instantly" and painlessly. If there's a practical limit, it's very high, I think.tokumaru wrote:As my programs get more complex, I sometimes worry that the assembler is going to bump into some sort of limit and will not be able to handle the huge amount of labels I'm using...
The only time I've seen assemble times become significant with ca65, though, was with Movax12's "high level" SMB disassembly. In this case, all the complicated macros he used really do consume a lot of assembly time. (As I recall, it was on the order of "minutes".)
Though, even if you did run into assembly complexity issues, this can be helped a lot by breaking up your code into separate units and assembling them separately, letting you do incremental builds on only the stuff that's changed since the last build (makefiles make this easy to accomplish). Doesn't help link time, but unless you're also exporting/importing all these generated labels for some reason (why would you need to?), I don't imagine the generated data will give you link time problems anyway.
In my project, I am not even using makefiles, just because a need has never come up. I have a huge pile of assembly code, but the whole build process only lasts about a second, so... I never bothered. I just let it build from scratch every time.