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I just found out recently that you can configure Visual Studio (but this question is the same for any compiler) to dump the intermediate .o files into a separate folder outside of the source tree, instead of alongside each individual project. That makes it easy to clean the project up to archive to zip or something along those lines.
Why is that kind of configuration not more common? Are there any significant downsides?
This is the default in Visual Studio, and has been for quite some time (at least as far back as VC++ 6). The intermediate directory defaults to the same as the output directory, not the source directory. This means that all object files are placed alongside the final output.
In fact, it requires some jiggery-pokery if you’re working with projects that expect compiler output to be placed alongside source files. Since VC++ defaults to giving object files the same name as their corresponding source file (but with a different extension), if you have several source files with the same name (but different paths), then compilation of each source file will overwrite the corresponding object file. The last file to be compiled “wins”.
This, naturally, breaks the build.
Requiring source filenames to be globally unique across a project is actually pretty annoying. You can alter the output location so that it for example includes a path; the linker still does the Right Thing.