Hello, I think everyone here will agree to say that compilation times in Rust are problematic. Recently, there was an argument on IRC about reducing compilation times by reducing the use of GC and failures. Although I agree it's good to reduce Rustc's overhead, I think there are more important problems. The total duration of a build matters only because you have to recompile the whole crate on each modification. In C++, the duration of the complete build of a project matters less because when you compile incrementally, you only have to rebuild a couple of files - those you modified. I know the "1 crate = 1 compilation unit" is the model chosen by Rust, but this is a major issue for production. Nobody will ever use Rust in production if they have to recompile thousands of lines of code on each modification.
On some of my personal projects, I "solved" this problem by splitting the codebase into several crates, that I compile statically, and then link together using extern mod. This is not really a solution, because this implies that there is no cyclic dependency between each of the small crates, or I end up with issues trying to compile it, because using extern mod requires that the library corresponding to that mod exists before compiling the crate that depends on it. But strictly speaking, a compiled crate is nothing more than a module hierarchy, and so is a single Rust source file, so we should be able to compile a single file to some sort of .o and then link all together to form a crate. References to modules outside of this file just require the first passes of the build, not the code generation, so it should be ok regarding to cyclic dependencies, and if not, we could still introduce some kind of auto-generated interface file, like Caml does. I know it's quite a big work, and that the current system is quite good, but having this is very important if we want Rust to be used in production. Sorry if this topic has already been posted several times, but I feel this is important, and the related issues seem to date (#2369). I think it's a real mistake to report this to post-1.0. Leo
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