Comment by Animats
2 days ago
This isn't a huge problem. My big Rust project compiles in about a minute in release mode. Failed compiles with errors only take a few seconds. That's where most of the debugging takes place. Once it compiles, it usually works the first time.
A minute is pretty bad. I understand it may work for your use case, but there are plenty of use cases out there where errors typically don't fail the compile and a minute iteration time is a deal killer. For instance: UI work - good luck catching an incorrect color with a compile error. Vite can compile 40,000 loc and display it on your screen in probably a couple of milliseconds.
Different programming languages have different qualities. For some tasks I like Ruby because it doesn't get in my way. But Ruby is built in C and so are JS VMs and web browsers etc (C/C++/Rust). A good LLM can convert Ruby code to Rust for a 10-100x performance boost, only multiplying the number of lines of code by 2. That makes Ruby a good programming language and Rust a good target language.
Consider how long it takes to compile the Linux kernel for example. So one minute is very good.
Compile what language?
Probably js given they mentioned Vite; not exactly sure I’d call it “compiling” in nearly t he r same order of magnitude of complexity though…
But how big are your big projects?
About 40,000 lines of my own code, plus a hundred or so crates from crates.io.