| Rust 1.90 Speeds Compile Times |
| Written by Kay Ewbank |
| Tuesday, 23 September 2025 |
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Rust 1.90 has been released. The new version uses LLD as the default linker, meaning linking and incremental builds are much faster. It also has native support for workspace publishing in Cargo, and the x86_64-apple-darwin target has been demoted to tier 2. Rust is popular for situations including being embedded in other languages, writing programs with specific space and time requirements, and writing low-level code.
The improvements in this version are designed to make life better for developers rather than adding major new language elements. The headline improvement is the change so the x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu target now uses the LLD linker for linking Rust crates by default. The developers say this should result in improved linking performance compared to using the default Linux linker (BFD), particularly for large binaries, binaries with a lot of debug information, and for incremental rebuilds. Developers should find that LLD is backwards compatible with BFD in most cases, meaning you shouldn't see any difference other than reduced compilation time. The improvements for linking time are impressive. Writing about the change on the Rust blog, Rémy Rakic on behalf of the compiler performance working group pointed out that linking is often a big part of compilation time, and that in tests by the developers, for an incremental rebuild, linking is reduced seven times, resulting in a 40% reduction in end-to-end compilation times. For a from-scratch debug build, the team saw a 20% improvement. The second useful improvement is that Cargo adds native support for workspace publishing. This means you now get automatically publishing of all of the crates in a workspace in the right order (following any dependencies between them). The team says that while developers could do this using external tooling or manual ordering of individual publishes, this brings the functionality into Cargo itself. The third change of note isn't an improvement as such; in Rust 1.90, the target x86_64-apple-darwin has been demoted to Tier 2 with host tools. The standard library and the compiler will continue to be built and distributed, but automated tests of these components are no longer guaranteed to be run. The reason for the change is that Apple has announced the end of support for the x86_64 architecture, and GitHub has announced that they will no longer provide free macOS x86_64 runners for public repositories. The Rust Project uses these runners to execute automated tests for the x86_64-apple-darwin target. This has resulted in the Rust team demoting the x86_64-apple-darwin target to Tier 2. Developers won't see any immediate changes; builds of both the standard library and the compiler will still be distributed by the Rust Project for use via rustup or alternative installation methods. However, over time, this target will likely accumulate bugs faster due to reduced testing. Version 1.90 of Rust is available now.
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