alt Hacker NewsUltimately it's the fact that compile time was not a first-class consideration during the design of Rust's important features. There's only so much you can do to mitigate the consequences.
Ultimately it's the fact that compile time was not a first-class consideration during the design of Rust's important features. There's only so much you can do to mitigate the consequences.
Compilation times were a consideration, but they were a subservient consideration to the prime considerations of 1) being as memory-safe as GC'd languages, 2) exploring the limits of statically-guaranteed thread safety, and 3) being as fast and memory-efficient as C and C++. If Rust had been willing to compromise on those goals and instead had just, for example, used a virtual machine with pervasive garbage collection and been designed for dynamically-dispatched generics then you'd get a lot of compilation time reductions for free, but the world didn't need another Java, it needed a more secure systems language to stand up against C++ where every previous challenger had failed.