[novok]

AFAIK swift and rust were actually initially design and made by one engineer for a couple of years before anyone else worked on it, and were led for years by those specific engineers. Chris Lattner for swift and Graydon Hoare for rust.

[josephg]

Interesting to know! But even if those guys made super fast front ends, they would have been always limited by the speed of the llvm optimizer and code generation backend. Writing a compiler on llvm isn’t the same as writing a compiler from scratch.

[novok]

In swift's case it's a single threaded frontend that is fairly inefficient: https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/main/docs/CompilerPerfor...