[nyberg]

Compilers are performance critical in the sense that you wouldn't want to wait 15 minutes to an hour for your code to build. Consider the number of layers of cache applied to compilation pipelines along with distributed builds to speed it up in places where they have millons of lines of code (e.g game studios) along with turning off linker features which slow things down.

You'd want faster compilation so that you can test your changes without it breaking your flow where having to wait a 1-5 minutes means you'll end up reading HN or checking chat for 10 or so minutes. That's also why there's interest in hot-code reloading and incremental linking to make it faster as it will further reduce compilation to just the changes you've made and nothing more.

[kaba0]

There is no significant difference between managed languages and something like zig in this category of programs, it is not a video codec, so I stand by my “no performance sensitive” claim. And especially because algorithms matters much much more, there is a good chance that a faster one can be implemented when you don’t have to care about whether that memory location is still alive or not.

[rtfeldman]

After on-disk caching, the biggest performance improvements I've seen to compilers have been from changing how data structures are allocated/deallocated and laid out in memory.

I haven't seen much opportunity to improve algorithm performance because which algorithms are applicable is heavily constrained by language design.

In my experience the difference between something like Zig and a language with managed memory is large.