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Why is the Rust compiler so slow?

(sharnoff.io)
302 points Bogdanp | 2 comments | 26 Jun 25 19:29 UTC | HN request time: 0.4s | source
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taylorallred ◴[26 Jun 25 20:29 UTC] No.44390996[source]▶
So there's this guy you may have heard of called Ryan Fleury who makes the RAD debugger for Epic. The whole thing is made with 278k lines of C and is built as a unity build (all the code is included into one file that is compiled as a single translation unit). On a decent windows machine it takes 1.5 seconds to do a clean compile. This seems like a clear case-study that compilation can be incredibly fast and makes me wonder why other languages like Rust and Swift can't just do something similar to achieve similar speeds.
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lordofgibbons ◴[26 Jun 25 20:39 UTC] No.44391100[source]▶
The more your compiler does for you at build time, the longer it will take to build, it's that simple.

Go has sub-second build times even on massive code-bases. Why? because it doesn't do a lot at build time. It has a simple module system, (relatively) simple type system, and leaves a whole bunch of stuff be handled by the GC at runtime. It's great for its intended use case.

When you have things like macros, advanced type systems, and want robustness guarantees at build time.. then you have to pay for that.

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1. teleforce ◴[28 Jun 25 02:22 UTC] No.44401934[source]▶
>When you have things like macros, advanced type systems, and want robustness guarantees at build time.. then you have to pay for that.

Go and Dlang compilers were designed by those that are really good at compiler design and that's why they're freaking fast. They designed the language around the compiler constraints and at the same managed to make the language intuitive to use. For examples, Dlang has no macro and no unnecessary symbols look-up for the ambiguous >>.

Because of these design decisions both Go and Dlang are anomaly for fast compilation. Dlang in particular is notably more powerful and expressive compared to C++ and Rust even with its unique hybrid GC and non-GC compilation.

In automotive industry it's considered a breakthrough and game changing achievement if you have a fast transmission for seamless auto and manual transmission such as found in the latest Koenigsegg hypercar [1]. In programming industry however, nobody seems to care. Walter Bright the designer of Dlang has background in mechanical engineering and it shows.

[1] Engage Shift System: Koenigsegg new hybrid manual and automatic gearbox in CC850:

https://www.topgear.com/car-news/supercars/heres-how-koenigs...

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2. pjmlp ◴[28 Jun 25 07:52 UTC] No.44402967[source]▶
It isn't an anomaly, it was pretty standard during the 1990's, until C and C++ took over all other compiled languages, followed by a whole generation educated in scripting languages.