[llogiq]

I used to work on the Rust compiler itself on a Chromebook with a 1.1GHz dual core, 4G RAM and 32G of disk. That's about as far from a high-end PC you can get. Most mid-range phones nowadays have more processing power and memory than that. And the Rust compiler has been sped up considerably since then. Even with a 4 year old mid-tier PC you can get a complete Rust compile in half an hour. Roughly half of that is building LLVM.

So you can of course compile your Rust compiler. If you are used to compile clang or gcc, it's not that much of a hassle. And the benefits have already been shown. If you only want to compile Rust code, and not develop it, mrustc might also be a good choice for you (it doesn't implement borrowck, just what's needed for codegen).

Finally, if you don't want to use Rust drivers, you can simply configure them out and don't need to build Rust. It'll be quite a long while until Rust will arrive in the kernel outside of drivers (which tend to benefit most from Rust anyway).