But two minutes is still a lot of time to wait for a build, especially if you’re doing gamedev and want to prototype something fast.
It seems nalgebra is the culprit here: because Rust doesn’t yet support const generics, it has to use some hacky type-level metaprogramming to represent numbers, and that will definitely destroy build times.
2 minutes for a full build from scratch. Incremental builds afterwards take seconds, though unfortunately linking of big projects can still sometimes takes up to around a minute.
My toy project that I ported from a Gtkmm article done in the days of "The C/C++ Users Journal" takes around 25 minutes to build from scratch on a Asus 1215B netbook (dual core, 8GB, HDD).
The original code, after being migrated to an up to date version of Gtkmm, takes a couple of seconds with GCC 7, not more than one minute if at all.
The big difference? I don't need to compile from scratch all the 3rd party dependencies.
With every release from Rust I do a clean build to assert how much it has improved.
It was much worse, so congrats on the work achieved thus far, but it is still a pain to set up a project from scratch.
On upgrading from an OC i5-4670k to a r9-3900x, my compile times for a clean release build went from 20 minutes to 2.