Re:What agents mean for Rust (and vice versa)
by dangoodmanUT on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @08:19AM
(#50086533)
> Compile times are really only an issue of you need to iterate extremely fast.
Isn't that the point of agents?
Re:What agents mean for Rust (and vice versa)
by virtualritz on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @08:27AM
(#50086625)
The agents are only blocked by this when the features they implement are extremely simple.
The average feature I spec and have an agent implement takes an hour or two (Either Opus 5.5 or DeepSeek 4.1 Flash, both at high and using subagents).
In-between the agents do not build that often because that is instructed in my setup.
They build maybe every 20mins when the target is Rust.
Ofc the models do not work like this by default. In fact they want to build all the time.
But as always, you need to tune the harness/setup for what you're using.
IMHO: if you use these models with Rust w/o those constraints/instructions "you're holding it wrong".
One of my spare time projects is a "prompted" 3D modeling app that is now (incl sub-crates I maintain) about 500k lines of Rust.
The link stage is the longest. An incremental build (w. sccache+mold) where I changed a few source files is done and runs after maybe 20s max on my 2022 Rhyzen 6800H-powered laptop.
I think this is acceptable when working on that kind of project.
For games where this matters I usually prototype in some other language first, TS, Python, Lua, whatever then translate to Rust when game mechanics and magic numbers are settled.
Or you simply put those into a config file that gets watched by the game.
At work we have an image manipulation crate that takes like 30mins to 'dev' and about an hour to 'release' build.
The WASM version takes even longer, about 2h, and needs like 55GB RAM during build.
But that crate has only to be built once a month.
And if it mattered we could split it because it's a metacrate made of ~20 sub-crates.
Yeah, it would be nice if Rust were even faster (I remember compile times almost a decade ago, when I started using it)!
But I think for the typical use cases where you would (should!) reach for it, it's quite ok already.
And if not you can work around it quite painlessly.