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Comment by rattray | Hacker News Reader

Correct – it took about 6 months for people to become fully productive in Rust, which matches what I've heard elsewhere.

Though I will note that the Rust compilation times were also far more painful than I'd expected – even the tiny (~5k sloc) app at hand would take what felt like a minute to recompute the red squigglies in my editor.

TS felt slow if it took 5-15sec, and Sorbet (for Ruby) was usually <3sec IIRC, so a minute+ was pretty bad.

Rust was in the realm of "just don't use this language if you have ADHD" since you really can't make progress without the compiler's exacting approval, and I'd constantly get distracted while waiting.

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Make sure you're not using `cargo build` to check your project. `cargo check` (the thing that makes your squiggles red) has never once taken me a minute to complete. RLS (the default LSP for rust uses `cargo build` - definitely switch to Rust-Analyzer (the soon-to-be default). I just ran `cargo check` on my workspace (10 crates, about 5k LoC) and it took 3 seconds.

My mistake! Replacing RLS with Rust-Analyzer, it now takes 20-30s to incrementally check a trivial change to some core model code (compared to ~90s with RLS), though now rust-analyzer gives me an unrelated error which I assume may be the result of using a different rustup/cargo binary or something – so I'm back to RLS. Oh well. It looks like RLS and Rust-Analyzer are working on unifying their code, so I'm sure this will get better in the not-too-distant future.

Hmmmm RA has been good with me, unless I’m doing something with Arrayfire or PyTorch which are both sensitive to $PATH. RA is seriously the real deal, so I suggest wrenching around until it works. I had to modify my $PATH in VSCode to fix the issue - do you know what library you’re using that causes the issue?

Ah, thanks for the nudge. Looks like I had run into https://github.com/rust-analyzer/rust-analyzer/issues/6835, had to bump the patch version of a library to fix.

Ironically, I recently received an ADHD diagnosis…

Everyone and their mother is receiving an ADHD diagnosis nowadays. Call me a conspiracist, but I believe this is just one more case of deliberate overfitting by Big Pharma, coupled with the consequences of technology on our attention spans and other characteristics of our cognition and behavior.

As someone that might be similarly diagnosed for the same reasons, your comment does make me more optimistic of achieving something significant in my life, though.

Believe whatever you want, I am just glad that some things are starting to get better for me. I didn't need big pharma to tell me that stuff was bad, I struggled to even get help for far too long, and stigma around over-diagnosis certainly prolonged my problems here.

I'm sorry if I sounded like I was trying to invalidate your diagnosis. I'm sure ADHD is a real issue many people face their entire lives without receiving proper information or care and of course it's better to find out as early as possible. I realize now your comment wasn't the proper place for me to rant about this. I'm happy for you.

It's all good. It's a really, really tricky topic, for sure.

> you really can't make progress without the compiler's exacting approval, and I'd constantly get distracted while waiting

You can use cargo check for that, which is fast. It's only for running tests or the like that an actual build is required. Rust also has IDE integration via rust-analyzer, so the error-marking "squiggles" can be recomputed incrementally.

By the same author, nay help: https://www.lpalmieri.com/posts/fast-rust-docker-builds/

This is also covered in a chapter in the book when you deploy the project. I did not do a live deploy but the it looked like a nice setup even for a pet project.

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