Zig 0.12 vs Rust 1.85: Compile Time for Linux 6.10 Systems Utilities

Systems programmers often prioritize fast iteration cycles, and compile time is a critical factor when building small, frequent utilities for Linux environments. This article compares compile times for Zig 0.12 (the first fully self-hosted Zig release) and Rust 1.85 (a near-future stable Rust version with incremental compilation improvements) when building common systems utilities targeting Linux 6.10 on x86_64 hardware.

Test Setup

All benchmarks were run on a machine with an 8-core AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, 32GB DDR5 RAM, and Linux 6.10.0-rc2 kernel.…