And then people are amazed for it to achieve compile times, compiled languages were already doing on PCs running at 10 MHz within the constraints of 640 KB (TB, TP, Modula-2, Clipper, QB).
It is weird to lump C++ and Rust together. I have used Rust code bases that compile in 2-3 minutes what a C++ compiler would take literally hours to compile.
I feel people who complain about rustc compile times must be new to using compiled languages…
That's a reasonable trade-off to make for some people, no? There's plenty of work to be done where you can cope with the occasional runtime error and less then bleeding edge performance, especially if that then means wins in other areas (compile speeds, tooling). Having a variety of languages available feels like a pretty good thing to me.
Well, I personally would be happier with a stronger type system (e.g. java can compile just as fast, and it has a less anemic type system), but sure.
And sure, it is welcome from a dev POV on one hand, though from an ecosystem perspective, more languages are not necessarily good as it multiplies the effort required.
What do you mean by saying Java compiles just as fast? Do you mean to say that the Java->bytecode conversion is fast? Duh, it barely does anything. Go compilation generates machine code, you can't compare it to bytecode generation.
Are Java AOT compilation times just as fast as Go?
> Duh, it barely does anything. Go compilation generates machine code, you can't compare it to bytecode generation
Why not? Machine code is not all that special - C++ and Rust is slow due to optimizations, not for machine code as target itself. Go "barely does anything", just spits out machine code almost as is.
Java AOT via GraalVM's native image is quite slow, but it has a different way of working (doing all the Java class loading and initialization and "baking" that into the native image).
Go was a response, in part, to C++, if I recall how it was described when it was introduced. That doesn't seem to be how it ended it out. Maybe it was that "systems programming language" means something different for different people.
That's a bit unfair to the modern compilers - there's a lot more standards to adhere to, more (micro)architectures, frontends need to plug into IRs into optimisers into codegen, etc. Some of it is self-inflicted: do you need yet-another 0.01% optimisation? At the cost of maintainability, or even correctness? (Hello, UB.) But most of it is just computers evolving.
Indeed, and thankfully there exist languages like D and Delphi to prove as being a modern compiler and fast compilation times are still possible 40 years later.
