In the context of this post, that's absolutely hilarious they're vibe-porting their Zig codebase to Rust.

I love Rust, but you couldn't pick a language with slower compile times... XD

Compiling Rust is actually quite fast in my experience. The problem with many Rust projects is that they pull in dependencies left, right, and center. Pulling in Tokio makes your project compile an entire thread management system even if you're just compiling Hello World, and simple oneliners containing macros can easily spread out into dozens of lines of code each.

Linking is also slow, and the extreme amounts of metadata produced for LLVM almost serves as a benchmark for LLVM's throughput, but that's all in an effort to produce faster, better binaries in the end.

On godbolt.org, Hello World compiles and runs in about 250ms. Zig's Hello World compiles and runs in 600ms. Of course Zig is still an unfinished language so optimisations like these are probably hardly a priority, but when it comes to lines of code per second, the difference isn't as big as people make it out to be.

What will make the most difference is how many crates the rewrite will pull in. The PORTING.md file specifies "No `tokio`, `rayon`, `hyper`, `async-trait`, `futures`" for the second phase, which should definitely get rid of the excessive compile time many people associate with Rust projects.