SMRTR ProgrammingAug 20, 2026lobste.rs

Why compiling Rust to WebAssembly is slow

SMRTR summary

Compiling Rust to WebAssembly with debug info enabled can be 40x slower due to a quadratic bug in LLVM's Register Stackify pass. The pass rescans growing lists of DBG_VALUE records inefficiently, turning 23 seconds into 31 minutes for some crates. A proposed three-part patch eliminates the quadratic blowup, dropping ed25519-compact's codegen from 1,684 seconds to 23 seconds — and the existing LLVM fix barely helps.

SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to lobste.rs.

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