elisp - Can I limit the length of the compilation buffer in Emacs?

Question

Is it possible to limit the number of lines that the Emacs compilation buffer stores? Our build system can produce some 10,000 lines of output on whole product builds, if no errors are encountered. Since my compilation buffer also parses ANSI colors, this can get very, very slow. I would like to have only e.g. 2,000 lines of output buffered.

Answer 1

It appears that comint-truncate-buffer works just as well for compilation buffers as it does for shell buffers:

(add-hook 'compilation-filter-hook 'comint-truncate-buffer)
(setq comint-buffer-maximum-size 2000)

I tested this by running compile with the command perl -le 'print for 1..10000'. When it was done, the first line in the compilation buffer was 8001.