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How to speed up the Rust compiler in September 2026

279 points · 171 comments · trickypr

  1. s08148692 · · focus · HN ↗
    I finally gave in to the rust hype and built a new project in it (or my agent fleet did). Almost instant regret. My poor machine with just 2TB HDD and 24 cores was almost immediately crippled by agents each working in their own sandbox, each one building and compiling

    Most projects my fleet works on are in other languages (TS, Go, Elixir) and can comfortably handle 10+ agents working in parallel, but not rust. I had to cap the fleet to 5 workers and build a dedicated resource monitor to step in and tidy up every time the disk almost filled up

    That and general progress on building is far slower, with far more time spent building and testing than any other language I use.

    Ended up rebuilding in Go, the perf gains weren't worth it

    1. virtualritz · · focus · HN ↗
      Make a cargo wrapper (or ask your clanker) with a global build lock.

      Cargo run/test/nextest/run only, check/fmt etc should be excluded.

      This avoids contention/oversubscription of the CPU which makes builds up to 300% slower from what I measured.

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