recompiling a huge software stack like mozilla

A small change in a 1000's of lines of code leads to running the ./configure again on the entire software.

Is there any alternative, where we ca开发者_如何转开发n compile only the changed file and the files associated with it?

If you have a sane Makefile.am with proper dependencies, running ./configure and make should only recompile files that depend on the touched file. So make already does what you are asking for.

If your Makefiles are not sane (e.g. they only work if you run make clean) and you are compiling C or C++ sources, using ccache might give you a speed gain. With ccache only the preprocessor part is run and its output compared to a cache of compile outputs. If nothing changed in the file or its includes it won't be recompiled. Properly installed it is run in a transparent way.