I've been thinking a lot about a solution to Rust's notoriously slow compile times. From my research, it's not the borrow checker that is the issue, it's the heavy optimizations and monomorphization, and macro expansion [0]. There are efforts to improve Rust compile times, but I realized recently that it will never be lightning fast, so we (Rust users) should really be developing more scripting languages and DSLs that we can put all of the fiddly bits into.
Places where we would benefit the most from this is in the Games and UI space. I know game devs have already started by integrating lua, like with mlua [1]. In the UI space i think Makepad is the best example of a team making a dedicated DSL that can be hot-reloaded [2].
I think we need more of this! Go make a DSL next time you feel crushed by the weight of compiling Rust crates!
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[0] and by my research i mean Claude. this is a great blog with many posts about improving compile times https://nnethercote.github.io/
[1] https://crates.io/crates/mlua . I don't have a reference for a project using it though so please reply if you know of one!