[stymaar]

> Why do you think it is not slow?

The average cargo check for the projects I've worked on, usually finish in less than 1 second, with `cargo build` completing in a single digit second (often below 2s), it's not slow by any means.

> I believe c, Fortran, zig, C#, Java and golang are all faster compiling languages.

Sure, but the difference between type checking is 10ms and type checking in 500ms is barely noticeable for a human being anyway, despite the x50 difference.

> That makes rust pretty slow in my book.

“Slow” is a perceptual thing. It doesn't matter if it's slower in absolute benchmark performance. If it doesn't slow you down in your work it's not “slow”.

> As far as I know the only language that compiles slower is C++

Typescript's compiler is much slower than Rust's, but it's plenty fast enough for most people and you almost never see complains about it because it mostly doesn't matter outside of pissing contests.

[iainmerrick]

Typescript's compiler is much slower than Rust's, but it's plenty fast enough for most people and you almost never see complains about it because it mostly doesn't matter

But you have to compile Rust code to run it. You can run TypeScript code without type-checking it. That’s a massive difference in the development workflow.

The new TSC, supposedly 10x faster, will be very pleasant to have but not as much of a game-changer as you might expect. A 10x faster Rust compiler would be incredible.

[stymaar]

> But you have to compile Rust code to run it. You can run TypeScript code without type-checking it. That’s a massive difference in the development workflow.

And yet I'm waiting for TSC every day while almost never thinking about rustc…

> The new TSC, supposedly 10x faster, will be very pleasant to have but not as much of a game-changer as you might expect.

It will be very nice, but I don't expect it to be a game changer, tsc isn't fast but it's fast enough to get the work done, the annoyance is there but it's objectively minimal. Anything else is pointless internet language war.

> A 10x faster Rust compiler would be incredible.

For development? Not really, not for me at least. Against the endless rants about rustc's performance on HN, absolutely.

[msdz]

> tsc isn't fast but it's fast enough to get the work done, the annoyance is there but it's objectively minimal.

For our small codebases, maybe. The tsc-in-Go announcement had VS Code compilation go from >120 seconds to ten.

[iainmerrick]

"Compiling" is vague here; for TS I think you need to distinguish bundling from type-checking.

If you're talking about bundling the entire app, 120 seconds down to 10 seconds is a great saving, but other bundlers can do it much faster already. Most people don't bother using TSC to bundle their code. I can understand why Microsoft might insist on using it, but it's not typical.

For type-checking the entire app, I would see that as akin to running all the unit tests. 120 -> 10 seconds is excellent, but not something that should be a constant bottleneck in your development workflow.

I can definitely see that 10x improvement being crucial on large teams (and/or LLM swarms) where the speed of the CI queue becomes a bottleneck.

[stymaar]

Exactly: tsc was “slow enough to be painful” in the context of the 2.5Mloc codebase of VScode.

But it's not too slow for most people.

Likewise, Rust may be slow enough to be painful for some big projects that need to often rebuild from-scratch in release mode, but that niche is definitely much smaller than the size of the “rust compiles too slowly” crowd on HN.

I gave Rust classes in university a few years back, and literally none of my students complained about slow build times. At this point it's much more of an internet meme than an actual pain point for most devs.

[DoesntMatter22]

Small apps in college are much different than huge apps in the real world

[stymaar]

Most people complaining about Rust being slow have never worked on anything close to a production app written in Rust.

By the way, for most apps, rhe difference from an app we'd write in class is not as nearly as big as you'd expect: most of the code lies within dependencies anyway, and you need roughly the same amount of them in both cases.

Of course there are exceptions, apps that are tens of millions of LoCs exist, but it's not the majority.

(And they tend to be naturally split in multiple crates, which is the default workaround if a rust project takes too much time to compile).

[leecommamichael]

Speaking as someone who has also given courses at university teaching a programming language (Swift,) the students also do not know how fast computers are and that when their brand new super-computer lags and hitches for full seconds while coding it's pretty much "working as expected" to them. I haven't written Rust in a few years, but I remember it being remarkably similar to Swift both in API design ergonomics and compiler quality. I am open to this having changed, and I can appreciate @stymaar's frustration if it has done so drastically.

[muragekibicho]

Compiling my C code with gcc happens in a single eye blink. Changing the format to .cpp and compiling with g++ takes 5 eye blinks. I've never used rust and I can't imagine blinking more than 6 times while waiting for my code to compile.

[kibwen]

And you wouldn't need to, because the Rust compiler is "slow" relative to compilers like Go. Relative to Clang and g++, the Rust compiler is fast.

[zdragnar]

Most people use esbuild or swc or oxc instead of the typescript compiler directly specifically because of how slow tsc is.

In fact tsc was slow enough that it was rewritten into a different language for version 7, with the performance of the compiled output as the primary motivation.