As a case in point, I have a project that uses amethyst and nalgebra (and their 200 transitive dependencies).

On upgrading from an OC i5-4670k to a r9-3900x, my compile times for a clean release build went from 20 minutes to 2.

But two minutes is still a lot of time to wait for a build, especially if you’re doing gamedev and want to prototype something fast.

It seems nalgebra is the culprit here: because Rust doesn’t yet support const generics, it has to use some hacky type-level metaprogramming to represent numbers, and that will definitely destroy build times.

2 minutes for a full build from scratch. Incremental builds afterwards take seconds, though unfortunately linking of big projects can still sometimes takes up to around a minute.

My toy project that I ported from a Gtkmm article done in the days of "The C/C++ Users Journal" takes around 25 minutes to build from scratch on a Asus 1215B netbook (dual core, 8GB, HDD).

The original code, after being migrated to an up to date version of Gtkmm, takes a couple of seconds with GCC 7, not more than one minute if at all.

The big difference? I don't need to compile from scratch all the 3rd party dependencies.

With every release from Rust I do a clean build to assert how much it has improved.

It was much worse, so congrats on the work achieved thus far, but it is still a pain to set up a project from scratch.

I added a comment about a cloud builder. Would appreciate comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20767201