This ethos played out in the C++ community 5-ish years ago. It turned into a compiler with quadratic behavior, and eventually many people who didn't care at all about compiler performance cared a lot.

It turns out that compiler speed makes development faster, keeps people interested in the language, and ultimately allows more iterations before release (which can be better for speed and safety than throwing in a bunch of extra compile steps).

You misread my comment. I didn't say it was useless, I said there are things with higher priority. And well… unlike Rust, C++ sucked at some of those things too, this I think makes them different.

Rust offers a better trade-off between compilation time and other parameters, than C++.

They didn't say it was useless either; they also said it wasn't a high priority. Developer velocity and ergonomics should always be a high priority for compiler writers.

"High" as in "higher than runtime speed, safety, abstractions, plugin system"? Where would you put it if you had to rank compilation speed with other criteria?

And let's admit even though Rust compilation speed could use some improvement, it's not terrible.

I re-read it. Yes, they're not saying it's useless, but then what are they objecting to?

Rust could have been designed for faster compilation without sacrificing runtime speed, safety, good abstractions, expressiveness and whatnot in any regard. The people designing Rust just either did not care or did not have the experience to do so. And it can not be fixed anymore because that would require too much breaking changes.

And yes, a substantial time is also spent for things like the borrow checker but no all of it.

An no, it is not a niche requirement. Short compile times are absolutely critical for developer productivity. One main reason Golang exists and got popular is that people got fed up with how slow C++ is to compile. Not to mention that most people on this earth are not as privileged as to have a beefy machine.

cargo check is pretty fast.

> Rust could have been designed for faster compilation without sacrificing runtime speed, safety, good abstractions, expressiveness

Can you back this up? I'm not a programming language expert, so if there's some common knowledge you're referring to, I'm not aware of it.

> most people on this earth are not as privileged

There's very little "privilege" you need to compile Rust. In my spare time, I develop mainly in Haskell on my ThinkPad X270 and it goes just fine. Building libraries takes time, yes, but you need to do it just once. And while it's building you can think with a piece of paper more — also privilege in a way.