Comment by mlugg

> OP handles the small change problem by hashing IR instead of source text

OP here---I think you got confused somewhere, because this isn't true! The hashes we take are of source code, they're just stored inside of the first IR. Source code is just pretty convenient to hash. If the change does turn out to be something trivial, we'll only invalidate the first-order dependencies of the source hash, which is never usually a big deal. In a particularly bad case, maybe we re-analyze, re-codegen, and re-link many different instances of a generic function, but even that wouldn't usually take long at all.

Also, it's actually important that we do notice these kinds of "trivial" changes in some parts of the pipeline---see Andrew's comment [0] on the Lobsters discussion for this post.

[0]: https://lobste.rs/s/rmzzdb/inside_zig_s_incremental_compilat...