Improving iterative compile times for projects depending on nannou

[mitchmindtree]

Slightly related to #178 but more focused on iterative compile times than fresh ones.

Currently it's easy to reach fairly significant compile times even for small projects (e.g. 10+ secs). I think there's likely a lot we could do to improve this situation with the design of nannou itself.

Here are some steps I think we could take:

• [ ] First, setup a reliable iterative compilation time bench-marking process. This should have some way of measuring iterative re-compile times for many different size projects including both examples and more significant downstream projects like spatial_audio_server. Just getting a setup working for examples would be a good start. I believe rustc provides a way to get a breakdown of exactly where the compiler is spending most of its time, though I don't remember how to do this off the top of my head.
• [ ] Survey the surface-level of nannou's API. Attempt to remove generic types in favour of dynamic dispatch where possible. This should be more than doable in many of the top-level APIs without any significant performance penalty.
• [ ] Encourage code generation during library compile-time where possible. E.g. perhaps providing type and function wrappers around generic types and functions with their type parameters filled using the default type will assist the compiler to pre-generate a lot of code for the common use case?

Any other ideas are welcome!

I've labelled this as good-first-issue as this might be a nice way to become familiar with a lot of nannou's internals and rust benchmarking tools.

[mitchmindtree]

Some interesting discussion on this issue popping up here.

[michal-z]

On Windows using LLVM lld-link.exe instead of MS linker improves build times. Please see here: https://github.com/rust-gamedev/wg/issues/50

[mystal]

On another project I'm working on, the biggest compile time improvements were:

1. Use lld to link on supported platforms.
2. For debug builds, set debug = false to remove all debug info from the binaries. I rarely use a debugger to debug Rust, and having this turned on increases the build time quite a bit! So I have it off by default and toggle it on if I ever need to attach a debugger.
3. Deduplicate dependencies when possible--i.e. only have one version of each dependency, especially syn/quote. This is less of a problem for incremental compilation, but I think it helps.

[kazimuth]

See also the "enable fast compiles" section of the Bevy setup guide: https://bevyengine.org/learn/book/getting-started/setup/

I've found that switching to those settings + a nightly compiler greatly speeds things up. It takes my mid-sized sketches (2-400 LOC) to 1second incremental recompiles. Adding debug=false to debug builds speeds things up even more, and you'll still get stack traces on panic, debuggers just won't work.