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by stymaar 20 days ago
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.

1 comments

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

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.