genuine question: how much can the frontend really impact compile times at the end of the day? I would guess most of the time spent compiling is on the backend, but IANA compiler engineer
- Serial took 10.2 seconds in the frontend and 6.2 seconds in the backend.
- Parallel tool 5.9 seconds (-42%) and 5.3 seconds (-14.5%).
So to answer your question, parallelising the frontend can have a substantial impact.
You are right that frontend is only a subset of the total compilation time - backend and linking time matter too. Happily, that's something that's being worked on too!
One obvious example of this would be C++, where a smarter frontend that doesn't do textual inclusion of a million lines would significantly improve compile times.
But that's low-hanging fruit "optimization", no? Once you get around it, and this has been forever, the bottleneck is in the backend generation. So if Rust has already solved this, the area where they can improve most is the backend generation?
Most C++ builds I have worked with, and all of them being MMLoC codebases, were actually bottlenecked by the high memory pressure. In part due to heavy templates and symbol visibility.
I think the history of C++ implementations shows that it's not low hanging fruit, it's a huge effort to implement and the payoffs aren't game changing.
