Hacker News Reader

Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

For rust, to me build time performance is not as important as runtime performance.

I think this is one of those self-fulfilling kind of things. Rust is known to have glacially slow compile time perf with very fast runtime perf. Thus it would attract people who consider runtime performance more important than compiler performance and put off people who think the opposite.

This isn't mean to replace LLVM for production build but rather help all the large project with 10+ minute debug builds.

My workflow is pretty much write some code, build, see the result, repeat. So for me, debug build times are a big deal.

Having used plenty of AOT compiled languages during the last 30+ years, I disagree.

It is possible to have both.

It would be interesting to see both within the same project. Dependencies would be compiled with LLVM and the application would be compiled with cranelift. Through an intelligent project structure you would be able to get both fast compile times and a fast debug build.

As an example of how it works both ways is Eiffel.

While you are developing you get a JIT based enviroment with the productivity workflow one knows from languages like Java and .NET (MELT VM).

Then when it comes to a proper release, you use the AOT compiler which uses C or C++ based compiler as part of the build workflow (Eiffel AOT compiler generates C or C++ code as its intermediate format).

So you get the quick edit-compile-debug workflow, and when feeling like doing a full release build just let the C or C++ compiler do its job.

There are other examples, I just choose Eiffel as one of thm.

There was a language that started working on an entirely separate compiler toolchain for debug builds (prioritising compilation+linking speed) - I think it was zig but I can't remember exactly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com