Comment by lrvick
2 hours ago
If we added rust to our stage3, it would add 6 hours of wall time with the fastest 192 core CPU on the market to the time it takes people to reproduce and validate stage3. Add a couple days for someone with just a 16 core consumer CPU.
Our goal is to allow people to reproduce the entire tree from source in the shortest time possible, so no one has to trust us, thus encouraging as many people to do it as possible, thus preventing us from having the means to inject supply chain attacks without anyone noticing.
It is literally a goal for new users to be able to run a server that bootstraps itself, and then bootstraps and signs all future releases, with remote attestation proofs. The shorter that initial build window is the better, which is why things like fast linkers written in early-bootstrappable-languages are so important.
How long are all the rust builds in your distro? If the compiler is 20% faster (my LLVM Clang results), you "just" need 30 hours of building time to get even, and I'm sure there is enough rust around (maybe not all in your distro) to make this worthwhile.
In any case, people could be using the stage2 or stage3 binary and still get the same binaries in the end, they are just alternative versions of the same package that should be compatible.
And using a 192 core CPU is a bit futile, have you looked at how well the work can parallelize? Isn't there some good remote worker solution you could use to have more cores available for the whole fleet without locking a 192 cores machine for a single build? It doesn't look very efficient to me as it is.