Rust's Slow Compile Times: A Deep Dive
The slow feedback loop and long compilation times of Rust are frequent complaints. This blog post delves into the Rust compiler team's efforts to improve compilation speed and the challenges they face. While the team makes weekly progress, tackling performance improvements and regressions, and has achieved significant gains (e.g., nearly doubling speed on a specific benchmark in three years), near-instant compilation remains elusive due to technical hurdles and prioritization. These include the compiler's large and complex codebase, the need to balance various trade-offs in optimizations, maintaining stability, adding new features, and the limited time and resources of volunteer contributors. The post concludes by outlining future improvement directions, such as optimizing specific compilation workflows and performing large-scale refactoring of the compiler.
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