Rust Compiler Performance: rustdoc Build Time Slashed by 28%
charliermarsh · x · 2026-08-02
Nicholas Nethercote published an update on Rust compiler performance optimizations. Data shows a healthy 5.59% mean wall-time reduction for the compiler over the past eight months.
Notably, rustdoc saw massive improvements, achieving a 28% overall build time reduction (with a 37.92% mean wall-time drop in some benchmarks). Key optimizations include:
- Impl Processing: Drastically reducing the work done when processing implementations, leading to double-digit performance gains.
- PGO Training Set: Adding rustdoc benchmarks to the PGO training set resulted in a 2.85% mean wall-time reduction.
- Sort Key Optimization: Changing the sorting mechanism to use a shorter text representation instead of long generated HTML strings, reducing instruction counts.
Additionally, significant speed improvements were made to Clippy.
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