Hacker News Reader

Rust could still have a toolchain like DMD devoted to fast compilation with minimal optimization. It just doesn't, yet (and likely won't for quite some time, since the present advantages of having a single toolchain are fairly significant and Rust doesn't have a formal specification yet).

View on HN

There are C compilers out there that work like this (like, say, the Plan 9 C compiler) and they rarely ever get used in practice, because GCC and clang -O0 are fast enough. I think making a second compiler backend just to eliminate the IR generation step isn't going to be the solution we want in the long run.

I think they are only fast enough because developers have not been exposed to better. In general, I would like to see more aggressive build modes for CI servers, and less aggressive modes for dev.

Also, I'm confused by the word "aggressive" here. Could you elaborate please?

Aggressive optimization. I just mean on a build server time isn't as much of a factor as local development.

Multirust makes working with multiple toolchains on *NIX pretty great, but no formal spec can be a pain. Ruby doesn't have a spec, yet has multiple implementations, so it's not the _end_ of the world...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com