Off the top of my head the compiler is slow because:

1. With C you can compile every file in parallel, in Rust compilation of a single crate is serial (hence splitting up large projects into many crates is important, but that makes development somewhat more difficult)
2. LLVM itself is pretty slow
3. Generic functions are monomorphized (there’s a unique machine code version of it for every concrete type combination they are called with) to improve runtime performance, but that gives LLVM a lot more work to do - see point 2

Does that laptop have an SSD?

FreeBSD is closer to Unix than Linux is

They exist because they reproduce faster than they die. The fact that they are necessary for some other species is irrelavant to their existance. Such a claim only really makes sense for plants and animals that people farm.

“great work” 🤭