Every analysis of the problem I've seen has concluded that the main problem is that rustc generates a lot of input to LLVM. Efforts to reduce compilation times are currently focused on doing more to the IR before converting it to LLVM IR.
Rust as a language is even more reliant on monomorphization and inlining than C++, due to core language traits such as Deref, AsRef, From/Into, and so on.
That said, in practice my personal experience has been that Rust compares pretty favorably on compilation speed, even to some high-level languages like C#. On many developer machines, the actual slow part is linking.
That is common wisdom but reality is more complicated. It's true in some projects, but not all.
Every analysis of the problem I've seen has concluded that the main problem is that rustc generates a lot of input to LLVM. Efforts to reduce compilation times are currently focused on doing more to the IR before converting it to LLVM IR.
Rust as a language is even more reliant on monomorphization and inlining than C++, due to core language traits such as Deref, AsRef, From/Into, and so on.
That said, in practice my personal experience has been that Rust compares pretty favorably on compilation speed, even to some high-level languages like C#. On many developer machines, the actual slow part is linking.