A new empty project compiles in under a second. However, adding dependencies will add some arbitrary number to this. Additionally, every hundred lines of code seems to add some amount of time between half a second and a whole second. I did some reading and read that generics are particularly expensive to compile, so I wonder if that accounts for the variance. I can't explain why cargo deps add time, though.

I LOVE rust-analyzer. It's actually what got me to reconsider Rust after I tried a year or two ago, and it is SO good.

Let me put it a stronger way: if you're seeing your cargo dependencies recompile every time, it is a bug. Please file one upstream. These bugs do happen, but they are bugs.

I don't literally see my deps compile. It's just that compile time gets slower. (I wonder if it's related to the linker?) Is that still a bug? Would be happy to report it if so.

If the slowless you're seeing is caused by the linker, which can very well be the case, consider using LLD as you can see significant speed improvements to the linking step.

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/39915#issuecomment-...

https://doc.rust-lang.org/1.22.0/unstable-book/compiler-flag...

If installed, you can run

    RUSTFLAGS="-Clink-arg=-fuse-ld=lld" cargo build --release

Looked into this :) unfortunately I run Mac so there's nothing I can do here. Tempted to dual boot Ubuntu, though.

It's a shame. I'm on the same boat and not being able to use lld adds a literal minute to my builds :-/

Ahh.

I am less sure, but I would think that's expected, given that it has to link everything together into the final binary. You're gonna end up giving the linker more work to do, as you suspected.