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Yes, I guess?: Cranelift, which is a LLVM-like library written in Rust. This could be used for faster debug builds in the future. There's a Rust backend using Cranelift [2].

If you mean addressing the poor quality of LLVM IR directly, then I don't know.

[1]: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/blob/main/crane... [2]: https://github.com/bjorn3/rustc_codegen_cranelift

It's unclear. There were discussions on the rustc Zulip that recently pointed to LLVM being actually quite performant at canonicalizing poor-quality IR; so any time saved in the backend by producing better IR is offset by the additional time spent in the front-end to produce that IR.

(I'm not a compiler developer, don't quote me on this)

I thought (maybe incorrectly) that most of the time is spent on linking in Rust codebase. Aside: out of curiosity, how did you find out about this fact/quirk about LLVM IR?

Amazingly, it's actually in the original rust-lang FAQ: https://prev.rust-lang.org/en-US/faq.html#why-is-rustc-slow

Thank you!