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How to speed up the Rust compiler in September 2026

279 points · 171 comments · trickypr

  1. knuckleheads · · focus · HN ↗
    Funny to see this now. I’ve got a private branch I am in the process of shaping up this weekend to show the compiler team. For deep nested projects like rust analyzer, if you emit the meta data about function types earlier for downstream slots to use, before successful type checking, you can start other crates earlier and use all the slots you have instead of sitting around waiting for the full type checking of the bodies (which other crates largely don’t care about). Something like 40% wall time speed up, maybe 10% to 15% if you have the parallel frontend on.
    1. embedding-shape · · focus · HN ↗
      Sounds lovely, give it a try on the codex-rs which seems to be getting close to using 2K crates in their repository any time now. Takes like 30 minutes to compile on a my beefy machine and it's a goddamn TUI, not sure what's going on, and not too interested in diving into that beast either.
      1. yearolinuxdsktp · · focus · HN ↗
        It’s insane. 45 minutes to build debug from scratch. Linking is super slow even in debug and that’s without LTO.

        Incremental compilation is not cleaned up. Older deps pile up and don’t get cleaned.

        Run out of disk space? Oh it’s just the 200+ GB codex-rs target folder.

        Forget about doing worktrees.

        Rust has a lot of work to do.

        1. surajrmal · · focus · HN ↗
          Worktrees can work with a shared build cache.
          1. embedding-shape · · focus · HN ↗
            And this specifically work with Rust and target/ directory? Please do share what you've validated to actually work here.
            1. ninkendo · · focus · HN ↗

                export CARGO_TARGET_DIR="$HOME/.cache/cargo-target/myproject"
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