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Comment by dcow | Hacker News Reader

This is a nice article. But, I don't really understand the conclusion that Rust compile times are a problem (and that C++ times are too). Rust is not a tool I pick up because 3s compile times are a nonstarter and I need sub 1s to feed my developer ADAH. I spend orders of magnitude more time writing Rust than I do compiling it so a 2s difference is utterly marginal. I don't know.. this obsession with compile times in the last 5 years seems rather irrelevant to me, not that I don't appreciate lower ones. But "problematic" is not an adjective I'd use.

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I think the article points a good reason why:

even with an incredibly powerful machine it takes many, many minutes to compile projects like chromium. On a "normal" machine, it takes several hours.

This is non-ideal and chromium is probably and already heavily optimized and well written project with lots of documentation.

In what language or toolset can you compile a project like Chromium faster? Big projects take a while to compile. Nobody has broken this rule yet so why are we fixated on it being problematic? Obviously, we could not compile the project and eschew all the optimizations we get, but then the end user would be unhappy. I don't know, I've always found the tradeoff to be quite understandable and inoffensive: if I want faster development (among other things), I use an interpreted scripting language. If I want a fast end product (among other things) I compile and optimize to machine code beforehand (obviously it's not that simple, but you get the point).

Something to stress is that the article is not just about compile times. It’s about compile+test times.

If Chrome were written in Python it’d be hella slower iteration times

> In what language or toolset can you compile a project like Chromium faster?

Go is super duper fast, so there's that.

Tcc was able to compile an older linux kernel on a single core 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 in under 15 seconds. [0]

[0] https://bellard.org/tcc/tccboot.html

> if I want faster development (among other things), I use an interpreted scripting language. If I want a fast end product (among other things) I compile and optimize to machine code beforehand

I want both. I was hoping Rust would give me both, but it doesn't.

I would hardly call Rust slow especially for the kind of things you’d use a scripting language for, though.

I think it depends on the kinds of projects you’re working on, and your developer workflow.

For small→medium projects I agree that Rust compile times are fine

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