This is only for debug builds though, cranelift. Isn't going to offer good enough performance for a release mode binary anytime soon (and probably never will).
If Cranelift makes debug builds much faster, then that's still a huge win. In my line of work, I do tend to compile things in release mode a lot purely because I often need to debug performance related problems, and for that, debug mode doesn't work. However, most of the test suites in my crates are built and run in debug mode. For example, the test suite for regex-syntax is fairly large, and it can take several seconds to build after making a change. Incremental compilation helped a lot with this, but there's still an annoying waiting period to run the tests. I'd be very happy to see Cranelift reducing the time it takes to run tests.
I 100% agree with you that Cranelift is a big deal (Last year I had to change my desktop CPU just to be able to build, in a reasonable amount of time in debug mode, the Rust project I'm working on − ok my CPU was still a Core 2 Duo at this point).
Even for things where debug mode is too slow, Cranelift could be a game changer since it promises to produce more performant binaries than LLVM in debug mode (Idk if it will be fast enough for you use-cases though).
I just wanted to point out that Cranelift won't solve the compile-time issue all by itself.
