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by josephg 740 days ago
Yes, rust has an incremental compilation mode that is definitely faster than compiling the whole program from scratch. But linking is still done from scratch every time, and that gets pretty slow with big programs.

I agree that it would be a lot of work to retrofit llvm like this. But personally I think that effort would be well worth it. Maybe the place to start is the linker.
2 comments
estebank 740 days ago
You're in good company: multiple people want to experiment with taking ownership of the linking and codegen steps to enable this kind of behavior. I would be more than happy to see that happen. I feel that the problem is a project of that magnitude requires a benefactor for a small group of people to work completely dedicated to it for maybe 2 years. Those don't come along often. The alternative is that these projects don't happen, lose steam or take a really long time.
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pjmlp 737 days ago
Given that VC++ does incremental linking, it seems to be the usual care of having someone caring enough to sort it out.
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