Re compile times: in nearly all cases I've seen, un-optimized builds (opt-level=0 or 1) are still quite fast. Do you know of any counter-examples? I'd love to see what the cause is.
Optimized builds though, yeah, you routinely hear about multi-hour builds. As long as there's a dev-friendly fast mode though, slow optimized builds don't bother me all that much.
What counts as "quite fast" for you? If you're talking about multi-hour builds, then you might not be talking on the same scale as others. I would consider 10 seconds to be pretty slow for a small/medium sized project.
Yea, fair. But for compiled languages, a few seconds is still fast for the field - Go takes that long on anything but tiny projects. My job's main Go binary takes about 30 seconds for a rebuild, for instance, and I know of other projects here that take well over a minute.
Many of the hours-long optimized builds for Rust projects that I've seen have turned to <10 seconds without optimizations on a clean build (possibly libraries are still cached tho), and even fairly large ones are still less than a minute. Tiny projects are around a second or less. I'm usually looking at pathological cases though, so I'm not sure how well those hold up in general.
So I'm not looking for interactively fast - very few languages achieve that on even medium-sized codebases, even if they're interpreted. But under a minute for a couple million lines of code in the project and libraries fits in my "reasonable" range.
In my experience, the problem is that debug builds (which, I assume, are not optimized) are still annoying. I recently built a new PC and got a Ryzen 3900x, so I'll probably have to check again with that :)
Now, "atrocious" may have been bad wording without context: I think it's just taking very long to finish the normal edit-start-debug cycle, compared to other languages (Go, Java, C# for example). I don't have any numbers right now, but I'll try to update my post once I get home, I've done a few basic emulator projects in Rust :)
At least, it was long enough to be annoying to me. Maybe I'm just too used to C#, which I use at work.
I've seen some pretty long compile times in C#, at my previous job building a local copy of the whole solution was around 40mins to an hour (400+ csproj).
I guarantee that a 400+ module Go program or 400+ Rust crates will build much slower (if no other reason, simply because Go or Rust compilers do a lot of work that is deferred to runtime in C#).
Optimized builds though, yeah, you routinely hear about multi-hour builds. As long as there's a dev-friendly fast mode though, slow optimized builds don't bother me all that much.