My laptop is a €500 bought in 2012 (it has 4Gb which is the minimum of every laptop since around 2010), and it runs rustc fine. Of course I'm not going to build a release version of any big project on it, but I won't be able to build Firefox or Chromium either on it.

You're exaggerating for effect, I assume. Rust compile does not require that much RAM.

Now, by default the "cargo" build uses all CPU threads, so if you have a 32 core Threadripper then yes, running 64 simultaneous "rustc" compiles will use 6 or 7 gigabytes.

Last I checked Rust needed more than 4GB of RAM to compile itself.

That's one of the reasons it was rejected in OpenBSD: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=151233345723889&w=2

clang needs more than 4GB to compile itself too.

"expensive computers"

"> 4 gigs of memory"

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_fsrp=1&_nkw=computer&_sacat...

by my standards, $5 is not an "expensive computer".

and more to the point, the language has little to do with the compilation memory required. Firefox and Chrome require significantly more memory than that to compile nowadays; they passed the 4 GB mark that could be compiled on a 32-bit machine many years ago, and both Firefox and Chrome were written entirely in C++ at the time. furthermore, you can always enable swap. it'll be slow, but if you can't afford a $5 computer, you take what you can get.

Used computers with 4GB of RAM are cheap, but not $5 cheap. The cheapest I saw at that link was $43 including shipping, for a 2008-era system. An Ivy Bridge SFF desktop with 8G RAM is $67 shipped (I have a couple, theyre nice little systems).