I've been learning and using Rust for nearly four and a half years, since version 1.6. That's a good amount of time to become familiar with some of the troubles of the language, the tooling, and the ecosystem. But this is a slightly different story, this is a dissent to a common criticism that the compiler is slow. In this discussion, I will argue that these claims are misleading at best.
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| rustc compiling a non-trivial application. |
There is plenty of evidence that suggests rustc is slow relative to compilers for other languages; Go can compile applications with similar complexity in 1/5 the time, and clang or gcc can do the same for applications written in C. It might be acceptable to justify that the Rust macro and type systems are significantly more complex than what is usually written in either Go or C, and that it warrants much heavier lifting by the Rust compiler. While there is some truth in that sentiment, I believe there is more to it than that. I believe it's more of a human problem than an algorithmic one.