With all the recent improvements to compilation speed (nightly, cranelift, mold-linker), Rust has become much more pleasant. Trivial and incremental changes to a medium sized crate like rust-analyzer (~200k loc) takes around 2.5s and a small Axum project takes around 0.5s.
These are my very subjective hobby benchmarks running archlinux on an AMD 9 7940HS.
Of course the initial build or the release build take much longer, but it makes me hopeful for the future.
Woah, 200k LoC is considered medium? I work at a Series A startup and our entire product (which is actually much more than a CRUD app) is only in the high tens of thousands, so that’s just a funny thought for me.
My theory is that because Rust is a low level language you tend to miss out on higher level primitives that promote more code reuse. Another theory is that Rust is mature but not quite as mature as something like Java, so there are fewer mature dependencies for you to delegate your work to.
Thoughts on what’s accurate? For context, I’ve written a bit of Rust myself, but am definitely a beginner.
Generics and cross-crate inlining enable zero-(runtime)cost abstractions, meaning there’s usually no perf downside to using 3rd party code instead of your own.
Strict type system, standardized error checking, thread safety in interfaces, and built in tooling for API documentation makes using libraries relatively easy.
The ecosystem is pretty large now, and has a culture of respecting semver, and focus on safety and reliability.
Cargo makes adding dependencies easy (the most common complaint is that it’s too easy, and people use too many dependencies).
These are my very subjective hobby benchmarks running archlinux on an AMD 9 7940HS.
Of course the initial build or the release build take much longer, but it makes me hopeful for the future.