Are long compile times just a product of Rust’ design? Or is there an issue with the compiler. Based on my experience with rust I would say it’s the former. It’s doing so many more checks for you then other compilers to prevent lots of problems that it’s bound to be slow.

I appreciate that they continue to speed up compilation/add flags. If the compiler gets slower every release it will eventually become unusable. I think the long compilation times will continue to get worse in the future as the rust compiler gets better at checking for errors, and I’m not sure what can really be done about that.

One thing that irks me is that they throw around the phrase zero cost abstraction a lot. And I just don’t buy it. Sure I get it, lots of things can be monomorphized so we don’t pay a runtime cost, but there is still a large compilation hit to do that, and it’s not zero cost to the programmer. One need only to look at Chandler Carruth’s cppcon talk “there are no zero cost abstractions” to understand that.