I use the following command to compile the Vivado libraries:

nvc --install vivado xpm_vhdl --dest=<some_directory>

This command also compiles the xpm_vhdl components but this is out of scope for this problem.

I noticed that NVC compiles each component individually, i.e., NVC is called each time a new file is compiled. I think this creates a big overhead during the compilation of the libraries.

With Questa or Modelsim, we can do the same but performance (the time it takes to compile everything) is severely affected.

A much better approach is to list all the components in a file and provide this file to a single call of the vcom command, e.g.:

vcom (...) -f <file_with_all_lib_components_listed>.cmf

This approach is really really much faster than calling vcom for each file.

I do use a Questa version that is not supported by Vivado so I have to compile the libraries manually (i.e., not using Vivado) and I can see the big different with both approaches.

To give some context, I do enjoy the speed of NVC during simulation compared to Questa. In our runners setup, we always compile the Vivado libraries before running simulation. As this takes less than 1 minute with Questa, the time cost is very minimal so we do it all the time. But with NVC, this is taking almost 8 minutes to finish.

At the end, running the runner job with questa ends up being faster than NVC just because NVC takes a lot of time to compile the libraries, which is a bummer.

Does NVC support such a feature where we can compile all files in one go?