Computers may become unresponsive during the compiling, or even crash if theyre low on computing power and RAM. I do have a windows gaming machine that i have installed the esphome onto, even that machine goes fan-mad during compiling.
I bet there are many who are happy when their hardware uses as little power as possible to run 24/7. Its a very normal thing that compiling code makes computers go mad, and kind of requires as many cores as possible with huge RAM, SSD’s. So compiling on a machine that is as light as possible for its main purpose is kind of upside down.
Anyways, i personally dont want to run Home Assistant and related components on more power hungry rig that is necessary.
I have a RPi 3 that i have my Home assistant installed onto, and would love to have the esphome dashboard running too with the ability to compile code, OR if there was a possibility to take the yaml files onto a USB stick, insert the stick into the windows machine, let that machine do the compiling for all the files and then just move them back onto the RPi 3 where everything can be made usable by the dashboard. Even better would be if esphome could contact another computer on the same network with esphome installed and forward the compiling for it to get the compiled code back and ready to upload wherever needed, and with that disable the possibility to even accidentally start compiling on the RPi 3 or similar hardware.
I did once try to run a compile on the RPi 3, and when not crashing, it went 99% unresponsive for the time until done, hours. I guess also the SD card speeds are a factor here?
When first time running a compile, it could warn the user that it may cause a freeze or a crash if the hardware is not on par with recommendations: “Are you sure you want to run this code? It may be too hard for your rig bla bla”->“Dont warn me again? click here to turn the warning off” And there could be a link to most used hardware that is not enough, and a mention about the absolute factors that make a compiler hardware underpowered.