Overview

Recently, #2572 added an option --compression-level to the build subcommand, which can be used to lower the compression level to speed up the build flow. The specific reasoning in the original issue #2566 was related to distribution packages.

A similar reasoning applies to the develop subcommand: the artifacts that are build will only be used for local development, so their size is not that important. During local development iteration speed is a major concern, so disabling compression seems like a worthwhile tradeoff to me. The compression level for develop is currently hardcoded to 6 here:

Benchmarks

For my current project changing the compression level to 0 lowers the time that maturin dev takes from 2.7s to 1.0s, a significant reduction.

Solutions

I see a couple possible solutions here:

• Just hardcode the compression level to 0, under the assumption that no one really needs to configure.
• Add a --compression-level option to the develop subcommand, similar to what was done for build. In this case I suggest that we set the default to 0, to speed up everyone's workflow by default.

I'd be happy to submit a PR that implements either of these choices, I don't have a strong preference for either one.