Incremental Compilation

Back in September of 2016, we blogged about IncrementalCompilation. Whilethat post goes into the details, the idea is basically this: when you’reworking on a project, you often compile it, then change something small, thencompile again. Historically, the compiler has compiled your entire project,no matter how little you’ve changed the code. The idea with incrementalcompilation is that you only need to compile the code you’ve actuallychanged, which means that that second build is faster.

This is now turned on by default. This means that your builds should befaster! Don’t forget about cargo check when trying to get the lowest possiblebuild times.

This is still not the end story for compiler performance generally, norincremental compilation specifically. We have a lot more work planned in thefuture.

One small note about this change: it makes builds faster, but makes the finalbinary a bit slower. For this reason, it's not turned on in release builds.