Why is the Rust compiler so slow?

I’m glad that Go went the other way around: compilation speed over optimization.

For the kind of work I do — writing servers, networking, and glue code — fast compilation is absolutely paramount. At the same time, I want some type safety, but not the overly obnoxious kind that won’t let me sloppily prototype. Also, the GC helps. So I’ll gladly pay the price. Not having to deal with sigil soup is another plus point.

I guess Google’s years of experience led to the conclusion that, for software development to scale, a simple type system, GC, and wicked fast compilation speed are more important than raw runtime throughput and semantic correctness. Given the amount of networking and large - scale infrastructure software written in Go, I think they absolutely nailed it.

But of course there are places where GC can’t be tolerated or correctness matters more than development speed. But I don’t work in that arena and am quite happy with the tradeoffs that Go made.

As the story goes, a couple of Google developers designed Go while waiting for one of their C++ projects to compile.

If we wanted speed compile times only, we'd be using Pascal. No need for Go. In fact, if there would be ever a case for me to use Go, I'd rather go for Pascal or Delphi. But there isn't, it just doesn't fit anywhere.