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Comment by gen2brain | Hacker News Reader

Error handling in Go is actually very nice. You do not have unhandled errors, not possible unless you really want to not handle the error. Now I even use it similar in Python, amazing how many errors I did not handle at all. But what got me into using Go is that there is no libc dependency, just system calls, static binary, that is just amazing. I can compile Go compiler in like few minutes. Rust I cannot even compile after 24h, I use rust-bin in Gentoo,luckily that exists.

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> Rust I cannot even compile after 24h

Could I ask what hardware this is on? Even when building LLVM from scratch too as part of building the toolchain (which hasn't been the default for a while now, but could see Gentoo doing so), it never took that long on any hardware I own. (Granted, I never tried on the EEE PC I've got on some drawer, and its 2G of RAM would likely kill the whole thing before it got started.)

On a Lenovo T460 (mid-range laptop from 2016), with a fresh clone of https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/ and the default config:

  $ time ./x.py build
  ... snip ...
  Build completed successfully in 0:21:24

  real    21m24.736s
  user    67m48.195s
  sys     1m54.906s

Subsequent builds during development are faster (as 1. it doesn't build the same compiler multiple times, you can use the stage 1 build as normal, stage 2 is not strictly necessary and 2. if you modify one of the constituent crates of the compiler, the ones that are lower in the dep tree don't get recompiled). I've used this laptop on and off for rustc development for the last 10 years. Nowadays I spent more time using a cloud desktop that has much faster IO, but still use it during travels sometimes.

From the sound of it, I suspect that your issue might be that you don't have enough RAM and your build is swapping a lot.

This is an older thinkpad I am using, 4 cores, 16G of ram. LLVM is now dependency you cannot get rid of. That is painfull, but in the morning, after several hours it is usually done. Rust is LLVM plus I am not sure what, really painfull. And Gentoo also forces many different arches and flags for some reason, use flags are masked, you cannot easily disable them.

That sounds similar to the hardware on my T460 (2 cores, 4 threads, 16G). Would you consider cloning the repo and building it with the same command as my other comment? I'm really intrigued if the issue is the hardware/platform or "just" the Gentoo configuration or something else that doesn't affect the default build process.

> You do not have unhandled errors

Are you joking? It's trivially easy to drop the err or just not handle it accidentally in ways that are essentially impossible in rust. Especially when people re-use the `err` variable.

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