Comment by dist1ll
3 days ago
It's fascinating to me how the values and priorities of a project's leaders affect the community and its dominant narrative. I always wondered how it was possible for so many people in the Rust community to share such a strong view on soundness, undefined behavior, thread safety etc. I think it's because people driving the project were actively shaping the culture.
Meanwhile, compiler performance just didn't have a strong advocate with the right vision of what could be done. At least that's my read on the situation.
As OP demonstrated, Rust compiler performance is not the problem, it's actually quite fast for what it does. Slow builds are rather caused by reliance on popular over-generic crates that use metaprogramming to generate tons of code at compile time. It's not a Rust specific tradeoff but a consequence of the features it offers and the code style it encourages. An alternative, fast building crate ecosystem could be developed with the same tools we have now.
By comparison, Go doesn't have _that_ problem because it just doesn't have metaprogramming. It's easy to stay fast when you're dumb. Go is the Forest Gump of programming languages.
The 'windows' crate is really good at not being slow.
It ruthlessly uses features to cut down the amount of generated code and it only uses fairly simple #ifdef-like metaprogramming.