How speedy is the rust-language tooling itself these days? I remember wishing for a 'optimize nothing' or even 'just interpret' mode. Compile times noticably contributing to the feedback loop are a serious killjoy.
- The insanely long times are only for the initial build. Further builds are incremental and more tolerable.
- Compilation errors can be checked using 'cargo check'. It avoids the code generation step that's part of a build. I find myself doing it way more often than builds. So it's a time saver depending on how frequently you use it.
- You can extend the incremental build mentioned above using sccache [1]. At the minimum, it allows you to share the build cache between all your local projects. So it saves time if your projects or other builds share a lot of common libraries (that's very common in Rust, though). But sccache can go further by using online build caches (for example, using S3) that can be shared between hosts. Finally, sccache also supports distributed builds if you have a few machines sitting idle. (This is like distcc with extra features).