> Given Rust's numerous benefits, is having subpar compilation time really that big of a deal?

As someone who uses Rust as a daily driver at work at zed.dev (about 600K LoC of Rust), and Zig outside of work on roc-lang.org (which was about 300K LoC of Rust before we decided to rewrite it in Zig, in significant part because of Rust's compilation speed), yes - it is an absolutely huge deal.

I like a lot of things about Rust, but its build times are my biggest pain point.

I think this qualitative argument is made but is very unsatisfying for something as quantitative as compilation or runtime speeds.

It leads to blithe things about how there's no such things as zero-cost abstractions. But at one point the cost is so low and amortized that you're looking at something that's basically free.

What is the compilation cost of the `?` syntax shorthand? Probably quite low!

What about the compilation cost of underscores in number literals? Again, quite low?

To this point a bit, I think a lot of people talk about the borrow checker, but my understanding is it's fairly low cost, and I don't worry about it.

Monomorphisation costs though? That feels like something that could generate a lot of work.