alt Hacker NewsI'm also curious because I've (recently) compiled more or less identical programs in Zig and Rust and they took the same amount of time to compile. I'm guessing people are just making Zig programs with less code and fewer dependencies and not really comparing apples to apples.
Zig is starting to migrate to custom backends for debug builds (instead of using LLVM) plus incremental compilation.
All Zig code is built in a single compilation unit and everything is compiled from scratch every time you change something, including all dependencies and all the parts of the stdlib that you use in your project.
So you've been comparing Zig rebuilds that do all the work every time with Rust rebuilds that cache all dependencies.
Once incremental is fully released you will see instant rebuilds.