Some Rust projects are very quick to build; but some are astonishingly slow to build. e.g. lalrpop is unusably slow (~15mins to build on 2014 Macbook Air).
I think the place here performance breaks down is liberal use of generic types in functions. e.g. AsPath<T> and AsRef<T>, etc.) where the compiler creates the function for all the different types and then tries to collapse them again later on. So one rules of thumb is to only use those in the public APIs and convert the type so it can be passed around without generics internally within a module. Or maybe that's just me trying to do some `cargo cult` heuristics (haha! puns!)
I always thought `cargo new` should have been called `cargo cult`.
Gradle sucks big time, why do you think Google still does talks letting angry Android developers that Gradle + Android Studio will some day be as fast as Ant + Eclipse?
http://androidbackstage.blogspot.de/2017/04/episode-64-gradl...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKRK4SvMtRk
The Android Gradle plugin being slow as molasses is a typical discussion theme at Google IO since it was introduced. Being partially written in Groovy also doesn't help.
To be fair my javac comparison with with Gradle + Android Studio layered on top so it may be a bit slanted in favor of Cargo/Rust. That said I've never seen a Java build environment that I'd call 'snappy'.