Speeding up Rust edit-build-run cycle

66 points dlattimore

I wrote a blog post about improving warm build times for Rust projects. With a combination of using a faster linker, avoiding linking debug info and building a non-relocatable executable, we get a 16x speedup on the warm build time for our benchmark project.

To get as fast as I'd like though, I feel the need for incremental linking. So I've been writing a linker that I've called wild. It's not ready for use yet, although it's getting there. It can now link itself.