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Over the years compile speed improved quite a bit (recently this: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2023/11/09/parallel-rustc.html made quite the difference)

If we can squeeze more performance that's great but the largest concern I have around compilation is with the size of the target directory

It can balloon up to node_modules levels

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I don’t find node_modules exceeding even a few hundred megabytes very often. But Rust target directories can easily reach multiple gigabytes.

Apart from incremental compilation cache, a large chunk of it is debug information. Lowering debug info precision helps a lot (although it’s still suspiciously large.)

There have been some recent improvements to this, but yeah, it can be still quite large. There is a WIP development of a garbage collector in Cargo that could help with this.

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