The biggest Rust language feature is the borrow checker IMO, and unless you're running in unsafe, that's still doing its job. I always assumed the slowness was more based on the borrow checker analysis than on the error wrapping (option) stuff, slices, or functional bits.
I don't have anything solid backing this up, but I've often heard Rust proponents claim that the borrow checker is actually fairly cheap in terms of compile time overhead. Looking at the PR, it's obvious that it generates quite a bit of code (separate kernels for different block sizes, etc.) and does things like generics over tuples, but I don't know enough about Rust to pick out patterns that might be particularly slow to compile. It does have somewhat fewer unsafe blocks than I expected.
That was interesting indeed, thanks. For an outsider, the most trivial takeaway from that is something along the lines of "Rust is slow to compile and it's probably not getting 10x faster any time soon". Beyond the obvious culprits like heavy metaprogramming, it looks like death by a thousand cuts (not to mention that ggez spends 15 seconds on something that's not even accounted for in the profile, that alone is huge) and there obviously isn't a common root cause for huge compile times in general.
