Challenges of Build Times in Rust

Building large Rust projects, especially those using numerous dependencies like web applications, can lead to significantly slow build times. As projects scale, the number of crates can escalate into the hundreds, complicating the build process due to extensive code parsing, type checking, and linking requirements. Incremental builds, while designed to save time, often fall short in production environments where cleaning up after a build invalidates cached data. This results in developers facing prolonged wait times, and many end up turning off incremental builds to achieve faster builds despite their potential overhead.