rustc
Ranked 15 of 26 compilers by recommenders
The official Rust compiler, praised for clear error messages and helpful checks. Critics mainly point to slow compile times and unfixed soundness bugs.
The official Rust compiler, praised for clear error messages and helpful checks. Critics mainly point to slow compile times and unfixed soundness bugs.
18 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 9
- criticize it
- 9
- approval share
- 50%
Recommended in 8 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 9 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 1 recommender for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 8 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Excellent diagnostics and user experience
“Best in class here is probably rustc, which has incredible UX compared to most compilers.”
Comment from 10 May 2026 in “Making your own programming language is easier than you think (but also harder)” “rustc produces really good diagnostics”
Comment from 12 May 2026 in “If AI Writes Your Code, Why Use Python?” Useful checks during name resolution
“Having those annotations already meant that bootstrapping the feature to check the aliases during name resolution errors in rustc was almost trivial.”
Comment from 21 May 2026 in “Python 3.15: features that didn't make the headlines” “I’d much rather have it be reviewed by rustc than clang”
Comment from 24 Jan 2026 in “Banned C++ Features in Chromium”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Slow compile times
“It is indeed very slow when compared to a C compiler, or a zig compiler, or even a Java compiler.”
Comment from 9 Jul 2026 in “Rewriting Bun in Rust” “Rustc takes forever to compile, much longer than the time it takes to run the query.”
Comment from 23 Aug 2026 in “What if SELECT, FROM, WHERE were functions?” “`rustc` is impressively slow on a translation unit basis”
Comment from 20 Jul 2026 in “The Zen of Parallel Programming” - Comment from 21 Oct 2026 in “Tsrs: A Port of TypeScript to Rust”
Soundness bugs remain unfixed
“rustc mistakenly allows the code to assign a reference that is valid until the end of the current scope”
Comment from 13 Oct 2026 in “11 year old unsoundness bugs found in Rust borrow checker” “rustc definitely has soundness issues that haven’t been fixed”
Comment from 26 Dec 2025 in “Memory Safety”
Other compilers people recommend
The four most recommended other compilers, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GCC | 138 | 123 | 53% | 12 | 15 yrs9 owners | — |
| Clang | 74 | 50 | 60% | 12 | — | — |
| Free Pascal compiler | 38 | 7 | 84% | 11 | — | Approved |
| GraalVM Native Image | 31 | 9 | 78% | 11 | — | Approved |
| rustcThis page | 9 | 9 | 50% | 8 | — | — |
What people said
20 of the 21 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“the downsides are real, especially rustc speed”
“Even rustc doesn't take that long (on a powerful computer)”
“rustc is also awfully shoddy.”
“A bug as careless as can be. Relying wantonly on hashing for equality checking, without even wondering about the specific hash's collision probability.”
“rustc mistakenly allows the code to assign a reference that is valid until the end of the current scope”
“All the filesystem bloat is from Cargo and rustc.”
“Rustc takes forever to compile, much longer than the time it takes to run the query.”
“`rustc` is impressively slow on a translation unit basis”
“It is indeed very slow when compared to a C compiler, or a zig compiler, or even a Java compiler.”
“gives you consistent panics on overflow.”
“Having those annotations already meant that bootstrapping the feature to check the aliases during name resolution errors in rustc was almost trivial.”
“rustc produces really good diagnostics”
“Best in class here is probably rustc, which has incredible UX compared to most compilers.”
“It works OK, but it isn't perfect by any stretch.”
“IMO it works quite well for scanning output.”
“I’d much rather have it be reviewed by rustc than clang”
“rustc definitely has soundness issues that haven’t been fixed”
“it’s been fairly easy to do so”
“I think it's a pretty good default for rust”
“rustc being a different compiler every 3 months”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.