How to speed up the Rust compiler in April 2022 (opens in new tab)

Unrelated to this good work directly, but I experienced a funny moment yesterday. My new employer issued me a 16 inch M1 Pro - naturally, I installed Rust :)

The thing cargo builds (in release, no less) about as fast as my previous machine could npm install on a particular project.

I realize this is all M1 just absolutely chewing through it, but as long as compiler time improvements remain steady and constant I don't think I'll have a ton to complain about.

Tytytyty!!

I know this is not realistic, but the only thing rust is missing is faster compilation times. To be fair, it’s already super fast.

I was adding a repl[1] to create-react-app[2] (trying to achieve something like RoR’s console) and it took way too long for it to boot simply because the dependencies for something like a full scale web app take long to compile. Even with incremental compilation, that first boot time was too much.

[1] https://github.com/google/evcxr/blob/main/evcxr_repl

[2] https://github.com/Wulf/create-rust-app

when things are slow, it is easy to show big numbers like that, but in the end it still is VERY slow