Compiling linkerd-proxy took me also north of an hour on an Intel 6850k. Most of the time was spent compiling dependencies though. I also compiled envoy proxy which also took more than an hour.
Subsequent rust builds for linkerd-proxy were quite fast. For envoy most time was spent in Bazel itself. Probably because I just did a Bazel build instead of specifying a more specific target.
Out of curiousity I tried linkerd2-proxy here on a i5-1145G7 (I guess similar total CPU? Less cores, laptop model, newer). Took 5 minutes but used ~6GB resident. Maybe yours was swapping a lot?
My previous comment didn’t get saved apparently. I can hardly imagine that it was swapping. The machine has 32g ram. Perhaps compiling on macOS is slower. Most of the time was spent on compiling dependencies though. I can imagine that would be faster if you already have those builds lying around.
Subsequent rust builds for linkerd-proxy were quite fast. For envoy most time was spent in Bazel itself. Probably because I just did a Bazel build instead of specifying a more specific target.