Tips for Speeding Up Cargo Build in CI
Lightningat RustConf 2026 · on Wednesday, 2026-09-09· at 17:05· Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal, Palais des Congrès de Montréal·
summary
CI for a tiny OS called Ginger OS focuses on getting system tests on micro‑VMs back faster by shaving cargo build into three parts: downloads, compilation/build scripts, and linking. Use cargo build --timings to spot slow crates, remove default features (one dependency falls 30s→15s), run clippy/build/test in one job to reuse artifacts, and cache dependencies plus compiler artifacts with sccache and carefully keyed GitHub Actions caches. Swapping linkers trims linking from 2s→1.5s.
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