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by Insanity 2177 days ago
Having a fast feedback loop helps with staying in the flow. Compile times need to be short for this.
2 comments

That’s why you write unit and integration tests :) That’s how you get a fast feedback loop, instead of looking for it in compilation
What is "staying in the flow"?

Recompiling fast helps the most when learning to program, but not for actual applications with some complexity.

Many applications do not even have meaningful output by just running it, for instance they may take a long time to compute something meaningful.

> What is "staying in the flow"?

Run the code (with some debug logging statements, very likely), find a small mistake, make a few characters worth of correction, press your IDE's keyboard shortcut for recompilation and re-running.

If the last step is slow you can lose momentum and motivation to iterate quickly on the problem at hand.

Sure it doesn't apply to a lot of projects, that's true. But it's not charitable to claim it only applies when learning.

it depends on the problem domain. when working on say a desktop app with graphical ui features it can be very useful to be able to change/experiment quickly.

with an n tier web application you wont often be able to do that anyway.

And this is why in its current state you wouldn't be seeing something like RustUI or Rust Playgrounds.