Rust compiler performance

a year ago

Rust developers frequently complain about slow compilation times and the slow feedback loop.
The Rust Project does care about compiler performance, with weekly performance triages, comprehensive benchmarking, and continuous efforts to improve speed.
Compilation performance has improved significantly over the years, with benchmarks showing up to 1.77x speedup in clean builds.
Despite improvements, Rust's compilation times are still a bottleneck for many developers, especially compared to languages like Python.
Achieving near-instant rebuilds in Rust is challenging due to its complex type system, borrow checking, and other features.
Potential solutions include parallel frontend, alternative codegen backends, smarter incremental compilation, and faster linkers.
Technical challenges include the complexity of the Rust compiler codebase, trade-offs in optimizations, and maintaining backward compatibility.
Prioritization is an issue, as the Rust Project must balance performance improvements with stability, new features, and other priorities.
Contributors to Rust are mostly volunteers with diverse interests, and not all focus on performance optimizations.
Funding and long-term investment in compiler performance could accelerate improvements, but maintaining contributions is crucial.
Future initiatives include making LLD the default linker on Linux and running a compiler performance survey to identify bottlenecks.

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