Iteration time hasn’t been an issue, but compile times can be annoying. Though obviously compile time is related to iteration time.
Of course, all of these things are anecdotal. Collecting anecdotes is how you develop evidence, of course…
For context: most if not all of our team has developed calibration tooling similar to what we're doing now in the past, just at different startups and very specific to certain robotic or sensing configurations.
If anything, once we got CI sorted and started using our own internal registry I would argue that we are significantly faster in terms of iteration time. This is partly because the team is small, but also because most of our tooling is consistent and easy to keep in lockstep. Pulling libraries is done uniformly across platforms and architectures, and our CI runs (through GitLab) stay up-to-date with the latest tooling without issue. Having a stronger type system to detect errors early and a compiler that actually tries to give human-readable messages (looking at you C++ linker errors) using that type system makes everything so much easier.
Compile time seems like it would be an obvious bit that slows one down, but in practice sccache [1] does what it ought to and we barely notice it (at least, I don't and I haven't seen team members complaining about build times). Mostly I'd argue that the real thing holding us back is tooling extant to the rest of the wider Rust ecosystem. Debugging and perf tools are great in Unix land, but if you're making anything cross-platform you need to know more than just perf. That might just be my opinion though, I'll admit I'm still learning how best to apply BPF-based tooling even in Linux alone.
I also realize I'm responding to steveklabnik, so I suspect most of what I'm saying is well-known and that this comment is really more directed at TFA.
And yeah while I've had similar experiences, I'm glad to hear that it's so good for others. And, for example, sccache isn't something I have much experience with, so repeatedly hearing "it works well" is nice.
(Also, secret of replying to people on the internet: you are often replying to the anonymous reader of the discussion as much, if not more, than to the person you're replying to.)
That makes “Rust at a startup” a different equation.
I also just work there, the all-Rust bit started well before I joined!
That said, you are right that it's a point worth considering.
We have only your word for this.
Happy to talk about anything!