Per-user compiled artefact cache

[djc]

I was wondering if anyone has contemplated somehow sharing compiled crates. If I have a number of projects on disk that often have similar dependencies, I'm spending a lot of time recompiling the same packages. (Even correcting for features, compiler flags and compilation profiles.) Would it make sense to store symlinks in ~/.cargo or equivalent pointing to compiled artefacts?

[alexcrichton]

There's been musings about this historically but never any degree of serious consideration. I've always wanted to explore it though! (I think it's definitely plausible)

[aidanhs]

sccache is one option here - it has a local disk cache in addition to the more exotic options to store compiled artifacts in the cloud.

[djc]

sccache would be good for the compilation time part, but it'd be nice to also get a handle on the disk size part of it.

[Eh2406]

cc #6229

[Vlad-Shcherbina]

I think you can put

[build]
target-dir = "/my/shared/target/dir"

in ~/.cargo/config.

But I have no idea if this mode is officially supported. Is it?

[Eh2406]

Yes it is, as is setting it with the corresponding environment variable. However the problems with cargo never deleting the unused artifacts gets to be dramatic quickly. Hence the connection to #6229