Hacker News Reader

Comment by shark1 | Hacker News Reader

Reviews like yours are increasing my interested towards Rust. Apparently the tools and ecosystem are great, build on solid concepts and foundation.

View on HN

Rust has 3 major issues:

- compile times

- long compile times

It isn't that big of a deal in small projects, but if you pull dependencies or have a lot of code you need to think about compilation units upfront.

How is Rust in terms of incremental compile time? Is incrementally recompiling on file in a large project quick? Hopefully link times aren't that bad.

One thing I like about the JVM is hot code reloading. Most of the time, changes inside a method/function takes effect immediately with hot code reloading.

Link times are the worst part but solveable with mold[1]/sold. Incremental compilations are usually an order of magnitude (or even two) faster than clean compiles but tbh that can still feel slow. Helped by using something like sccache[2] or even cranelift[3] when debugging. Still not as fast as having a hot-reloadable language but it gets you to a relatively pleasant speed still IME

[1] https://github.com/rui314/mold [2] https://github.com/mozilla/sccache [3] https://github.com/rust-lang/rustc_codegen_cranelift

I've never been successful in getting sccache to really speed up projects, but then again only release builds have _really_ been impossible for me, and that's only when I was working on Deno which was absolutely massive.

sccache sped up my clean compiles by 2x on some projects, but it's a very YMMV solution most of the time

We had issues with long compile times at deno. Release builds were brutal, debug builds were OK as long as they were incremental. It was likely one of the largest open-source rust applications, but we were still quite productive.

Most likely you'll have years before it's an issue and there are mitigations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com