Usually, system programmers are quite interested in efficiency. In this regard, Rust shines as one of the most efficient languages, though there are still some issues with performance, as follows:
- A full build—in particular, an optimized release build—is quite slow, even more so if link-time optimization is enabled. For large projects, this can be quite a nuisance. At present, the Rust compiler is just a frontend that generates Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) intermediate representation (IR) code and passes such code to the LLVM machine code generator. However, the Rust compiler generates a disproportionate amount of LLVM IR code, and so the LLVM backend must take a long time to optimize it. An improved Rust compiler would pass to LLVM a much more compact sequence of instructions. A refactoring of the compiler is in progress, and this could lead to a faster compiler.
- Since version 1.37, the Rust compiler supports profile-guided optimization (PGO), which can...
