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The Cranelift compiler is in the same space, has been around for over a decade, and is actively maintained: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranelift

I'd like to throw my low-token-budget hat in the ring:

https://github.com/haydenflinner/rust/blob/main/PLIRON.md

iteration-focus is slightly there, i.e. fast hotpatching. But been focused on beating LLVM's compiled runtime performance as of late.

"Viable" in scare quotes, as it should be. Note that the third one you listed is forked from the second one with licensing credit stripped. None of them are actually used by anybody programming anything real. Calling this commoditization is ridiculous. Commoditization of being able to post superficially impressive claims that get upvoted to the front of HN while drowning out content that has >0 value to anyone on the planet, I suppose.

Spot on, hence why having a mix of JIT/AOT tooling is such a great experience.

Besides your examples, Eiffel, Oberon, Java, .NET, C++ (yep even for it), Cedar, Standard ML, OCaml, Haskell, Prolog, BASIC, Forth

This implies that Rust build times haven't been a topic of discussion for the last 10 years. They don't have long build times just for funsies, Rust is completely different from Lisp.

How does it compare to sccache ?

yeah, I've been doing some game dev with rust, and the cost of iteration is hugely higher (though it has been worth it so far). Often a build takes 10min+. Something like this project would help a lot if it supported windows.

It is pretty noticeable if you have agents working in subtrees too, a fresh build in a worktree can be like 20min with bevy

I’d gladly accept that for the efficiency and speed gained in prod, knowing I need to have a beefier host to compile it.

Indeed but I could only do this in the age of AI. Before a project like this was just out of reach.

It should be lower, but I haven't optimized it too hard on disk size. It's about iteration latency for LLM's.

AI maintains it, and its developer tooling really. The main use case is hotloading for LLM's to reduce wait-for-result time and to allow applications other be hot-debugged. Pause on panic is one of its main features I use all the time.

Yeah, this is pretty much a textbook example of what AI agents make possible these days: things that are ridiculously ambitious, but aren't conceptually very difficult (or, at least, are conceptually well-trodden ground). Things like emulators, language runtimes, platform reimplementations like Darling, etc.

JITting Rust isn't conceptually very hard: you just take rustc and make everything dynamic instead of static. The only thing that was stopping it before was the sheer amount of effort. Well, now we have a way to reduce that effort.

Yea it's claude+codex over the course of a month. It definitely isn't a one shot.

Its only prompt is 'make a flashy website for this project'. I think it's fine who reads websites anymore anyway. Readme.md for GitHub is the main thing.

The code is slop and the website too.

Perhaps a cynical take, but I feel sloppy content advertised seriously is enabling a transparent form of cross-domain self-selection which can be interesting to observe from the outside.

For quick iterations it's perfectly fine. Change something, see if it works. If it doesn't keep changing until it works.

In runtimes that provide quick dev loops some developers have continiously running unit testing sessions. They just fire off every few seconds and give intimidate feedback.

For some use cases, like speeding up local development, it's an excellent trade off.

It's a technology to improve iteration time with agents, or humans for live coding but nobody really writes code anymore so.