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Comment by tester34 | Hacker News Reader

jesus christ

rust's compilation times are as terrible as c++'s?

I don't know about Him, but at least when working with C++ I feel the compile time is entirely up to deliberate tradeoffs. With better planning and more effort made with forward headers, better implementation boundaries w/pimpl like constructs, and otherwise linking, and avoiding meta-programming entirely, I've not found it to be an issue.

Incremental C++ builds can be lightning fast, or it can be ridiculously slow. I've worked on large projects where change + incremental compile + test was less than 5 seconds. And I've worked with project where no effort was made where the same could take 10 minutes.

Keeping your C++ compilation times reasonable requires eternal vigilance (or a distributed system with aggressive caching).

In my experience Rust is faster for full clean builds, even if you use slow dependencies like Serde.

However C++'s compilation units are smaller than Rust's which helps it to have faster incremental compilation times for small changes.

So, same order of magnitude basically.

It's the same ballpark

I think we must do better

AAA games need less resources than those tree walkers

In my experience (C++ dev at work) C++ generally feels slower than Rust.

Edit: I quickly realised, this might only because of Rust's—in my opinion—superior type system and tooling, so maybe it just requires less waiting for compilations than when working C++.

Edit 2: I've never actually measured Rust compilation times, but even for large-ish graphical codebases (wezterm, alacritty, bevy games) I've compiled from scratch, it felt noticeably faster even then.

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