I really hate that I needed to do this, but I recently acknowledged that my 2016 macbook pro just isn't fast enough for rust development to feel good. I replaced it with a ryzen 5800 based desktop workstation for dev work. With my new machine a full build of a rust project I've been working on dropped from 2 minutes down to 20 seconds. Its an absolute delight and I highly recommend doing the same if you're writing rust regularly and can afford it. Hopefully the next few years of CPU improvements will forgive our collective inability to engineer CPU-efficient compilers.
Exhibit A, in our recent history of compilers we've had lots of examples of compilers / runtimes which seemed like they were pretty close to the threshold, only for another compiler to come out of nowhere and compile many times faster. Examples: (everything before V8) -> V8, Lua -> LuaJIT, Gcc -> clang (when it was new). And this is cheating but I'm doing it - every C compiler -> Go's compiler.
So the question is, how surprised would you be if some serious, experienced compiler people were capable of making a rust compiler that was 3x faster than rustc? Personally I would be not surprised at all. I suspect a lot of rustc's slowness comes from a combination of unavoidable time spent in llvm plus all the work rustc needs to do to convert rust to llvm IR. Its a bit of a smoking gun that most compilers built on top of llvm are pretty slow - swift, c++, rustc, pony, etc. And all the fast compilers have their own backend (go, v8, luajit, jai, etc). So yeah, I'm hopeful for MIRI and cheering from the sidelines.
Along these lines, Rust developers are working on adopting cranelift (a compiler framework used for JIT in Firefox) for quick debug builds, where runtime performance is not critical.