Comment by littlestymaar
2 days ago
In my experience working on medium-sized Rust projects (hundreds of thousands of LoCs, not millions), incremental compilation and mold pretty much solved the problem in practice. I still occasionally code on my 13 years old laptop when traveling and compilation time is fine even there (for cargo check and debug build, that is, I barely ever compile in release mode locally).
What's painful is compiling from scratch, and particularly the fact that every other week I need to run cargo clean and do a full rebuild to get things working. IMHO this is a much bigger annoyance than raw compiler speed.
Yes but are these the default? I want this to work pleasantly out of the box so we don't scare new users as quickly.
Incremental compilation has been the default for a few years now. Mold isn't and won't be anytime soon but AFAIK there's a PR to use lld by default and that should happen sooner than later. It's not exactly as fast as mold but it will still be a linking speed boost for everyone by default.