arewefastyet VS xshell

That page averages all the builds across different code bases. It doesn’t specify which version/tag of which code base, nor does it talk about the hardware.

https://arewefastyet.pages.dev/ - This page tracks compile times across some common crates over all supported compiler versions, with different hardware (2, 4, 8, 16 cores). This used to be https://arewefastyet.rs but the domain expired.

https://arewefastyet.rs/ see benchmark

You can check incremental compile times on http://arewefastyet.rs. Choose one compile mode (Debug OR Release, preferably Debug), one hardware config (4 cores let's say) and both profile modes (Clean, Incremental).

Compile times in rustc have been steadily improving with time, as shown here - https://arewefastyet.rs.

Every release doesn't make every workload faster, but over a long time horizon, the effect is clear. Rust 1.34 was released in April 2019 and since then many crates have become 33-50% faster to compile, depending on the hardware and the compiler mode (clean/incremental, check/debug/release).

Interestingly, the speedup mentioned in OP won't show up in these charts because that's a change on macOS and these benchmarks were recorded on Linux.

What is expected to be a gamechanger is the release of cranelift in 2021 or 2022. It's an alternate debug backend that promises much faster debug builds.

Yes plenty of effort goes into making Rust compilation faster, see https://arewefastyet.rs/, its FAQ, and some easy internet searches.

Thanks for your work on arewefastyet.rs, I was about to post a link to it haha

I implemented something similar. Deserialising a comma separated strings into a struct - example. Hope that helps!

Just a few minutes ago I learned about https://github.com/matklad/xshell and it looks nice!

For developer-oriented stuff, there's tools like xshell and cargo-xtask. For operator tasks that need to run in a deployed environment, it's not usually a big lift to add CLI subcommands to your binary. It's certainly more boilerplate and inertia than doing stuff in a live REPL, though, and sometimes difficult to recommend for truly one-off situations.

how was your experience with trying to use [xshell](https://github.com/matklad/xshell/) as a shell script replacement? was the boilerplate worth it?

Also xshell might be helpful here https://github.com/matklad/xshell

* time to compile whatever syn generated

I didn’t do a super thorough studies of things, but my impression is that 2, performance of syn itself, is rarely an issue. Most of the time it is 1) (and the associated problem of decreased build parallelism because half of the crates wait for syn to compile) and 3).

To get a feeling how costly a simple proc macro is, run this benchmark: https://github.com/matklad/xshell/blob/4e5090e9f79baeed1037b....

This is an API vulnerable to shell injection. I think it’s relatively important to design command-running libraries which don’t re-introduce the possibility of this error into Rust. The fix here is to ensure that the string is a compile-time string, and, preferably, even lex it at compile time. See xshell for an example of ergonomic and safe API here: https://github.com/matklad/xshell.

Note that “lexer level” proc macros, which don’t parse rust code, and which don’t generate a ton of Rust code, could be pretty light weight on compile times. Here’s a benchmark one can run to measure that: https://github.com/matklad/xshell/blob/master/tests/it/main.rs#L376