Very excited for Cranelift for debug builds to speed up development iteration - in particular for WASM/Frontend Rust where iteration speed is competing with the new era of Rust tooling for JS which lands in the sub 1 second builds sometimes (iteration speed in Frontend is crucial).
Sadly, it does not yet support ARM macOS, so us M1-3 users will have to wait a bit :/
But usually, at least I don't build an executable while iterating. And if I do, I try to set up the feature flags so the build is minimal for the tests I am running
There’s been a recent trend of rewriting tools in Rust with insanes speed gains
- Rspack (webpack compatible)
- Rolldown (rollup compatible)
- Turbopack
- Oxc (linter)
- Biome (linter and more)
- Bun (writing in Zig, does crazy fast bundling)
There’s several parts here that are crucial to Frontend development
For production you need:
- Minificion of source code
- Bundling of modules and source code into either one JS file or split into multiple for lazy loading only the parts you need
- Transforming various unsupported high-level constructs into something older target browsers support
- Typechecking/compiling, or stripping TypeScript if that’s in use
Build times could easily go to 10-20 minutes with older tools.
The development loop also gets hurt, here you’d want the loop from saving your change to seeing it in the UI to be almost instant. Anything else means you’ll have to develop crutch methods to workaround this (imagine moving and styling components only to need to sit and wait during each small incremental change).
Sadly, it does not yet support ARM macOS, so us M1-3 users will have to wait a bit :/