For me the biggest speedup in my workflow was not through actually cutting down on the build time but rather using cargo watch. With
cargo watch -x run, it automatically rebuilds and runs on any change so by the time I switch to the terminal it’s almost completely ready.With all the respect to the author and his
wildexperiments, that title does not match the linker-only focus of the content.So not only the post ended up with two (IMHO) bad recommendations (disabling debug info, building non-relocatable binaries with musl). But it also didn’t mention other important factors like
codegen-unitsandcodegen-backend. Since you know, code generation is the other big contributor to the cycle time (the primary contributor even, in many cases). There is also other relevant options likeltoandopt-level.Let’s assume that
opt-levelshouldn’t be changed from defaults for no good reason.With
codegen-units, it’s not the default that is the problem, but the fact that some projects set it to 1 (for performance optimization reasons), but without adding a separate profile for development release builds (let’s call itrelease-dev).Same goes for
lto, where you can have it set to"full"in your optimized profile, and completely"off"inrelease-dev.And finally, with
codegen-backend, you can enjoy what is probably the biggest speed up in the cycle by usingcraneliftin yourrelease-devprofile.And of course you are not limited to just two release profiles. I usually use 3-4 myself. Profile inheritance makes this easy.
And finally, you can set/not set some of those selectively for your dependencies. For example, not using
craneliftfor dependencies can render the runtime performance delta negligible in some projects.
Using the parallel rustc front-end might become an interesting option too, but it’s not ready yet.
I think you’re being way too harsh.
- His recommendations to disable debug info and PIC are not “bad”. He isn’t suggesting that should be the default. He actually only suggested that split debug info should be made the default on Linux which is a sensible suggestion.
- There are gazillions of other posts talking about codegen-units, cranelift and so on. I don’t think we need a repeat (though he could have linked to them).
The focus on linking was because this post is introducing his liker project.
OP ignore this naysayer.
If you’re like many developers and you generally use println for debugging and rarely or never use an actual debugger, then this is wasted time.
I weep for the time lost on debugging with println. Good grief. It’s like having access to a time stopping ability and going “nah, I like trying to add a marker and tracing footsteps”.
Yes, for multi threaded workloads there aren’t many options, but most are single threaded and eschewing a debugger is bonkers to me.
This is always one of the first things I setup on a project and teach or encourage my teams to do… I’m always surprised how many devs would rather use print statements all the time (not just in Rust, but especially JS/TS) when it only takes like 5 minutes to configure the debugger. Maybe 10 minutes if you need to search how to open the debugging port in Chrome/FF.
