My project isn't large or even mid-sized, but it has over a hundred dependencies. Building the dependencies certainly takes some time on my raspberry pi 4, but after that initial hit, every change to the project builds a release in about 15 seconds, and a debug build in about 10.

And on my Macbook Air M2, where I actually develop, these things happen fast enough to call them instant. Perhaps I'm a bit spoiled there due to the excellent hardware. As a comparison, a Typescript project I'm working on using a more powerful Macbook always takes about 5-10 seconds to build.

I don't doubt that actually large Rust projects take a long time to build, though, but even these small and mid-sized were rather slow to build a few years ago.

To clarify, dependencies significantly affect incremental builds too. Seems loading information about compiled dependencies into the compiler and/or resolving stuff about them can take significant time.

And on having a fast CPU, RAM and disk.

It makes a huge difference.

For what it's worth, I'm working on a project with about 1000 dependencies and incremental debug build time is about 4 seconds on my laptop.

That's already pretty good.

And also processor speed.