Item — HN Reader

"Incremental compilation is fast", is something people only talk about when normal compilation speeds are abysmal. Sadly, C++ set the expectations here, which made both Rust and Swift think that compilation times in the minutes is fine.

If your code compiles in 1 second from scratch then what do you need incremental compilation for?

2 comments

> If your code compiles in 1 second from scratch then what do you need incremental compilation for?

That's entirely fair. But, when I watch somebody like Jon Blow, with his 1 second from scratch compilation the result seems to be that he just iterates a lot more without being significantly more productive than I am. I can imagine for some parts of video game design fast iteration might be crucial, yet I struggle to imagine that compilation speed is what matters there. Systems design, art direction, plotting, these don't seem like factors where you need those one second compile times.

> If your code compiles in 1 second from scratch then what do you need incremental compilation for?

I really want incremental compilation in 100ms or less, this makes live reloading (such as with dioxus subsecond [0]) so much more enjoyable.

I don't care about the time spent on fully recompiling the whole project from scratch though.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1j8z3yb/media_dioxus_...