I’ve got a non trivial project in Rust, and it takes like 5 min to compile on my machine. Personally, I don’t know how anybody can call this fun. I find it insane to have to wait minutes to see the changes and to iterate. And like sure you can break shit up into crates to speed up compilation, but to do that you already have to have a design you’re happy with and that’s stable.
I find it insane to have to wait minutes to see the changes and to iterate.
i did devops between 2015 & 2025 and got used to the cadence of waiting between 15 & 180 minutes for testing/production pipelines to finish vetting the work i submitted to them.
i went back to doing IT last year and setup similar pipelines to update the code base my predecessor left behind and my new boss expressed the same consternation about waiting for your changes to iterate.
i’m thankful for it because it gives me 30-ish minute windows to browse and annoy people on lemmy throughout the day. lol
back around 2010, i did IT at a place that got a new isilon cluster to alleviate storage space woes with our netapps and the software engineers used this comic to make fun of the work we did when it caused a bottleneck over the network. lol
Gosh. I remember working with this back in 2019 and earlier. Our legacy products ran on it. I remember a new service we made (before Spring Boot really took off) used TomCat. It was so much easier to mess with. I asked why we don’t use that for our main product. Imagine my surprise when they said we actually used to.
I’m sure they had their reasons, I was a younger dev at the time and didn’t have insight into why they changed it. But still. Everything is so simple now. Java to run your jar. Your jar has your server built in. Done. And that’s not even including containerization.
I do miss Jenkins though. GitHub Actions seems to be the new hotness. Maybe I just don’t have the muscle memory yet, but it can be annoying.
Yeah, not gonna miss app servers. I do find the JVM was kind of made for a different era though. It’s basically designed to act like a VM on top of which all your apps run. So, startup time isn’t really a problem, and it wants to grab as much memory as it can by default. But nowadays everybody just makes small self contained apps that you can scale horizontally, so this whole model the JVM is tailored for isn’t really used outside big enterprise. And Jenkins was alight, I used to use it back in the day too. For the most part, I do find GitHub actions are an improvement though. You just make a script and magic happens.
I recall looking at mold, but it didn’t end up helping much in my case. And haven’t looked at sccache, that might actually help if it can cache compilation incrementally in an intelligent way.
Yeah I doubt it. I’ve worked in large Rust codebases too. I’d do some benchmarking. Cargo has some nice flags that let you see exactly what it’s doing. You can open the compilation report up in a browser and zoom in on different steps of the process and see everything.
I’ve got a pretty large Rust/Tauri program going. Breaking things into crates help, but if you touch enough bits of common libraries, everything needs to get rebuilt anyway.
I use Makefiles for everything. What I found helps is breaking out the parts that don’t change much into separate Make commands (like generating icons, linting, frontend, tests, etc), then leaving “make go” as the simplest inner iteration loop. That way, it’s a lot more bearable.
There’s also “make build” and “make fullclean.” You start one of those and take a long break.
Right, you basically have to start building a rube goldberg machine for compiling your app just so you don’t have to wait for minutes on end. And to me it is absolutely bananas that you can make a compiler this slow on modern hardware. Coming from largely working with Clojure where I have a live application I can interactively load code into as I edit it, this whole process feels insane.
I’ve got a non trivial project in Rust, and it takes like 5 min to compile on my machine. Personally, I don’t know how anybody can call this fun. I find it insane to have to wait minutes to see the changes and to iterate. And like sure you can break shit up into crates to speed up compilation, but to do that you already have to have a design you’re happy with and that’s stable.
i did devops between 2015 & 2025 and got used to the cadence of waiting between 15 & 180 minutes for testing/production pipelines to finish vetting the work i submitted to them.
i went back to doing IT last year and setup similar pipelines to update the code base my predecessor left behind and my new boss expressed the same consternation about waiting for your changes to iterate.
i’m thankful for it because it gives me 30-ish minute windows to browse and annoy people on lemmy throughout the day. lol
https://xkcd.com/303/
this comic will forever make me flinch. lol
back around 2010, i did IT at a place that got a new isilon cluster to alleviate storage space woes with our netapps and the software engineers used this comic to make fun of the work we did when it caused a bottleneck over the network. lol
haha this reminds me of my days working with websphere :)
indeed
Gosh. I remember working with this back in 2019 and earlier. Our legacy products ran on it. I remember a new service we made (before Spring Boot really took off) used TomCat. It was so much easier to mess with. I asked why we don’t use that for our main product. Imagine my surprise when they said we actually used to.
I’m sure they had their reasons, I was a younger dev at the time and didn’t have insight into why they changed it. But still. Everything is so simple now. Java to run your jar. Your jar has your server built in. Done. And that’s not even including containerization.
I do miss Jenkins though. GitHub Actions seems to be the new hotness. Maybe I just don’t have the muscle memory yet, but it can be annoying.
Yeah, not gonna miss app servers. I do find the JVM was kind of made for a different era though. It’s basically designed to act like a VM on top of which all your apps run. So, startup time isn’t really a problem, and it wants to grab as much memory as it can by default. But nowadays everybody just makes small self contained apps that you can scale horizontally, so this whole model the JVM is tailored for isn’t really used outside big enterprise. And Jenkins was alight, I used to use it back in the day too. For the most part, I do find GitHub actions are an improvement though. You just make a script and magic happens.
I think that’s pretty good insight. In some ways, the JVM served the role that things like Docker does today. That’s a good way of looking at it
yeah that’s a perfect analogy actually
mold and sccache help a lot with the compile times
I recall looking at mold, but it didn’t end up helping much in my case. And haven’t looked at sccache, that might actually help if it can cache compilation incrementally in an intelligent way.
Five minutes with build cache? Or from cold build?
With cache, then there’s almost certainly something wrong with your computer or project.
Also… you aren’t building with --release every time are you?
No, I’m not using --release every time of course. And sometimes it’s minutes even with the cache.
That’s highly abnormal to have minute long debug build times.
for 100k loc?
Yeah I doubt it. I’ve worked in large Rust codebases too. I’d do some benchmarking. Cargo has some nice flags that let you see exactly what it’s doing. You can open the compilation report up in a browser and zoom in on different steps of the process and see everything.
I’ve tried looking before and couldn’t get a significant improvement. I’ll have to investigate it again I guess.
I’ve got a pretty large Rust/Tauri program going. Breaking things into crates help, but if you touch enough bits of common libraries, everything needs to get rebuilt anyway.
I use Makefiles for everything. What I found helps is breaking out the parts that don’t change much into separate Make commands (like generating icons, linting, frontend, tests, etc), then leaving “make go” as the simplest inner iteration loop. That way, it’s a lot more bearable.
There’s also “make build” and “make fullclean.” You start one of those and take a long break.
Right, you basically have to start building a rube goldberg machine for compiling your app just so you don’t have to wait for minutes on end. And to me it is absolutely bananas that you can make a compiler this slow on modern hardware. Coming from largely working with Clojure where I have a live application I can interactively load code into as I edit it, this whole process feels insane.