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by nicoburns 258 days ago
> I don't do a full release build unless I've updated my compiler version, which only happens a few times a year

That's probably part of the difference. I do tens of these every single day.

GUI apps can be quite slow in debug mode, and as you say, the compilation artifacts build up quickly, which requires a cargo clean and then a fresh build.
1 comments
littlestymaar 258 days ago
> I do tens of these every single day.

Tens of clean builds? I'm very curious: why? (because obviously that puts you in a completely different situation compared to someone who can rely on incremental builds)

> GUI apps can be quite slow in debug mode

Full debug mode, definitely, but in that case I've always found that building the dependencies in release mode was enough, but YMMV. But then that's what incremental rebuild are about.

> and as you say, the compilation artifacts build up quickly, which requires a cargo clean and then a fresh build.

I've mostly experienced the PITA when working with multiple code bases over time or in parallel, but surely it doesn't happen every day, let alone multiple times per day, does it?

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nicoburns 258 days ago
> Tens of clean builds? I'm very curious: why?

It's partly a privilege of being able to. I have an MacBook M1 Pro machine with 10 cores, so clean release builds are tolerable. The slowest project to compile I work on regularly in Servo and I can do a clean release build of that in 3-4 minutes. Most of the other projects I work on it's more 30s to 2m max.

It's also a disk space thing. Between working on multiple different projects (I have 200 projects in total in my "open source repos" directory, most of those I only interact with very occasionally, but 5-10 in a day wouldn't be particuarly unusual for me) and switching between branches within projects I can build up 10s of GBs of data in the target dir within a few hours. And I don't have the largest SSD, so that can be a problem! So it's become habit to cargo clean reasonably regularly.

Finally, sometimes I am explicitly testing compile time performance (which requires a clean build each time) or binary size (which involves using additional cargo profiles, exacerbating the disk space issues).

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