[killercup]

> Is there something genuinely computationally harder about compiling Rust?

I'm not sure. Here's what I know: Rust has a complex type system. It also compiles whole packages (crates) at a time, and heavily uses monomorphization for generic code (that is probably less important for the type checking step but is quite heavy on the final compile-with-LLVM/link step).

If it was necessary, I'm sure it'd be possible to trade in some memory usage for CPU time (IIRC, a lot of memory is used for caching/memoization). But aside from outliners like that "10GB less memory usage" fix, rustc doesn't use that much RAM.