[1] https://bevyengine.org/learn/book/getting-started/setup/#ena...
Maybe you're comparing apples to oranges here. I've worked professionally with both Rust and Go for years now on a variety of real world projects, and I've never seen a similarly-sized Go codebase that compiles slower than a Rust one. If you're comparing incremental Rust compilation to first-time Go compilation, maybe they could be competitive, but... Rust is incredibly slow at compilation, even incremental compilation.
Yes, using lld can speed up Rust compilation because a lot of the time is often spent in the linker stage, but... that's not enough to make it as fast as Go.
YMMV, of course, but... my anecdotal experience would consider it disingenuous to say that Rust compile times are an advantage compared to Go, and I'm skeptical that Rust compile times are even an advantage compared to the notoriously slow webpack environments.
Rust is good at many things, but compilation speed is not one of them. Not even close, sadly. "cargo check" is tolerable most of the time, but since you can't run your tests that way, that's not actually compilation.
It is absolutely apples to oranges, but if you just care about the everyday local workflow and ability to iterate and test, it's close enough most of the time to not be much of a problem in either case.
I'm sure this experience isn't guaranteed for all codebases, and it certainly helps that I make heavy use of crates, which would minimize the work required during incremental compilation. Though I'm not actively going out of my way to optimize for incremental compilation really, beyond the config linked above.
Plus, Kubernetes is sitting at 5 million lines of Go code, by my count. Try compiling a 5 million LoC Rust code base... I won't wait around.
I would assume that a controller written in Rust bypasses all the complex legacy of the Kubernetes code base, and that's why it can compile faster. If someone made a similar project in Go[0] to write Kubernetes controllers in Go without depending on the mega-Kubernetes code base, I'm sure it would be incredibly faster at compiling than the Rust version.
Beyond that, I've heard that the Kubernetes codebase is internally just a nightmare of basically untyped `interface{}` stuff floating around everywhere, which would make the development experience subpar. I don't know how much this is exposed to custom controllers.
So, if Kubernetes is your only experience with Go... I'm sorry you've had to experience that. It's a product that people seem to agree is functional and works most of the time, but I can't remember hearing any positive experience from people working on it. From what I understand, it was originally prototyped in Java, and then hastily rewritten into Go before public release, and I'm sure that didn't help things.
[0]: conceptually, maybe something like this? https://github.com/ericchiang/k8s or an updated fork of it like this: https://github.com/karlmutch/k8s No idea how well either works, if at all.