"Productivity" is notoriously hard to measure in software.
While slow compile times may slow you down, and hence reduce your productivity, if the compiler prevents hard to fix bugs, it still may increase your overall productivity. Consider things like https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/04/eliminating-data-races-in-...
> Overall Rust appears to be fulfilling one of its original design goals: allowing us to write more concurrent code safely. Both WebRender and Stylo are very large and pervasively multi-threaded, but have had minimal threading issues. What issues we did find were mistakes in the implementations of low-level and explicitly unsafe multithreading abstractions — and those mistakes were simple to fix.
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> This is in contrast to many of our C++ races, which often involved things being randomly accessed on different threads with unclear semantics, necessitating non-trivial refactorings of the code.
Maybe the C++ was faster to compile, but in the end, fixing these issues took more time. There were more of them, and they were harder to track down.
Nobody truly knows the answers to these questions in the general case yet, of course. My point is just that "slow compile == bad productivity" is not inherently true.
Faster compile times are, of course, always desired no matter what.
While slow compile times may slow you down, and hence reduce your productivity, if the compiler prevents hard to fix bugs, it still may increase your overall productivity. Consider things like https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/04/eliminating-data-races-in-...
> Overall Rust appears to be fulfilling one of its original design goals: allowing us to write more concurrent code safely. Both WebRender and Stylo are very large and pervasively multi-threaded, but have had minimal threading issues. What issues we did find were mistakes in the implementations of low-level and explicitly unsafe multithreading abstractions — and those mistakes were simple to fix.
>
> This is in contrast to many of our C++ races, which often involved things being randomly accessed on different threads with unclear semantics, necessitating non-trivial refactorings of the code.
Maybe the C++ was faster to compile, but in the end, fixing these issues took more time. There were more of them, and they were harder to track down.
Nobody truly knows the answers to these questions in the general case yet, of course. My point is just that "slow compile == bad productivity" is not inherently true.
Faster compile times are, of course, always desired no matter what.