[kapilsinha]

Hi HN, I’m Kapil from CodeRemote. I am building Rust developer productivity tooling to speed up your edit-compile-run cycle. While I love Rust for its runtime performance and safety (not to mention its sweet syntactic sugar), I have long been frustrated with the resultant compile times.

This frustration hit a tipping point a few months ago, as I was building on a sluggish framework that made heavy use of code generation. From the Rust/Cargo/Rustc books and Rust community’s blog posts, I picked up and applied most of the standard tricks to speed up builds — but with only marginal improvement. Continued frustration led to me profiling and analyzing compile times, and soon I landed at the Rustc (compiler) source code…

I modified the compiler and implemented procedural macro caching, which has considerably sped up incremental builds for projects with macro-heavy dependencies. My fork of the compiler is still private as I’m still thinking through the licensing model; but if you’re interested in trying it out, please hit the “sign up” at the bottom of the blog. I am packaging it into a build/development server for a few Rust dev teams, and have already shared it with a few self-hosters! In this blog post, I discuss in detail my macro caching implementation and results. I’d love to hear your thoughts, and I’m happy to talk further about my compiler modifications.