[burntsushi]

To be clear, Rust has an "incremental" compilation feature, and I believe it is enabled by default for debug builds.

I don't think it's enabled by default in release builds (because it might sacrifice perf too much?) and it doesn't make linking incremental.

Making the entire pipeline incremental, including release builds, probably requires some very fundamental changes to how our compilers function. I think Cranelift is making inroads in this direction by caching the results of compiling individual functions, but I know very little about it and might even be describing it incorrectly here in this comment.

[pjmlp]

As far as I remember Energize C++ (and VC++ does a similar thing), allowed to do just that, and it feels quite fast with VC++ incremental compilation and linking.