Can use of internal instead of public decrease build times?

[MartyIX]

Perhaps this is a silly question but I'll try anyway. I have a .NET solution in .NET 8 with say 20 projects at this point. Now there is a shared project SharedProject and there are classes, and structs in this project that are public but they can be turned into internal (AFAIK).

My question is: If I succeed in changing some types to internal, can this change lead to faster solution rebuilds in some cases? The idea being if an internal type is changed, then perhaps msbuild can accelerate builds in more scenarios or use some heuristics.

Please don't tell me that the types should be internal in the first place. That's not what this question is about, I want to get better grasp how msbuilds behaves¹.

Footnotes

1. Yes, I should probably measure it using a binlog. ↩

[KalleOlaviNiemitalo]

Yes, changing things from public to internal can speed up incremental builds, if the projects produce reference assemblies and some referencing projects use those reference assemblies. See the ProduceReferenceAssembly and CompileUsingReferenceAssemblies properties.

If anything in the shared project (*.shproj) changes, then the projects that reference the shared project have to be rebuilt. But any projects that reference those projects can be considered up to date if the reference assemblies did not change.

[MartyIX]

That's interesting. Thank you for the comment.

So for normal assemblies there is no speedup, right?