Just to be clear about it, Rust today does do some amount of incremental compilation, and there is more work being done to continue to make it moreso. It's just very difficult to re-architect such a large and heavily used codebase. People are putting in heroic amounts of effort to improve things.
replyAn example that's being funded right now: https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-project-goals/2026/expansio...
Can't we have a system where we trade some performance for quick incremental compilation?
replyWe can always compile with full optimization just before shipping?
The article gestures at (and the author has made a comment in this thread about) how this is the case for Zig. You are right that there is tension here, and so that's exactly what you do: accept less performance for the gains in incremental, and then don't do incremental for final builds. It's a fine way to go about it, assuming that the lack of performance doesn't make the program unusuable. (Some people add some basic optimizations to their Rust debug builds, for example, because no optimizations is too painful to actually use.)
replyOf course we can, C++ even REPL and hot reloading tools.
replyThe main issue is that so far such tools haven't been a priority for Rust.