Is it possible to write Rust on a low end system?

8GB is not a lot to work with. It mostly depends on what crates you work with (unfortunately by default rust statically links all code in a single final step and that can be consuming a lot of RAM) Modern editors consume a lot of RAM, and if you have rust-analyzer running it's going to use a lot more in addition to the editor.

Tips:

• trim down yout dependencies (check out cargo tree, cargo depgraph and the cargo build --timings ). Instead of enabling all features on crates, enable only what you need.
• to free up disk space run cargo clean on the projects you are not currently working on, and regularly on your current project. If you change dependencies often it's going to use up a lot of GBs of disk space. You'll need to recompile all the dependencies every time you run it though, so don't do it too often.
• fully close other programs if possible (browsers, chat apps, etc). Look at your task manager to see what's using up memory and kill as much as possible. Consider browsing from your phone instead, and using the PC browser just as needed.
• emacs and vim have a very steep learning curve. I would suggest against that. If it's still too frustrating to code like this, you can disable the language server (rust-analyzer), but it's going to make coding harder. You'll loose edit suggestions and error highlighting. It's still possible to code without rust-analyzer but you'll need to run cargo check very often and read up method names on docs.rs a lot more.

• Use zram so swapping doesn't immediately slow things to a crawl.
• Use cargo check, often. You don't need to always compile.
• Add a release-dev profile that inherits release, use cranelift for codegen in it, and turn off lto.

Otherwise, it would be useful to know what kind of system you're running, and how is the system load without any rust dev involvement. It would also be helpful to provide specifics. Your descriptions are very generic and could be entirely constructed from rust memes.

what are you compiling?

Ahhh, Write != Compile....

maybe get a 2nd low end computer like cast off corporate PC and have that do all your compiling while you keep working on your main PC.

My system is heating up

A small note on that. If you could live with the compilation speed but it's annoying to have the CPU fans working all the time, you could address it by moving the CPU to a more power-efficient mode. Though that will only slow things down for you, and you're saying it's already slow and you're running out of RAM, so maybe heat/fans are not your biggest concern.

Personally, I currently use intel CPUs. Old ones I could undervolt AND limit in watts, making them silent and reducing power usage by a third at the cost of ~5% performance. My current one doesn't support undervolting sadly, and the options for wattage limits are also almost fully gone. What I use now is:

/etc/tmpfiles.d/cpu-prefer-powersafe.conf

# Possible values: default performance balance_performance balance_power power
w /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor - - - - powersave

Replacing "powersave" with "power" cuts the energy usage by half and makes the CPU fully silent at ~50 degrees... at the cost of 30% performance on this new CPU :(( Or keeping it as above, energy usage goes down somewhat (haven't measured precisely), CPU mostly silent at 50-60 degrees, performance down by 15%.

OK probably I wrote waay too much 😅

If you have the ability to recompile your system ( Gentoo, changing the optimization from -O2 to -Os, optimizing for size ), that may significantly free your system's resources for stuff.

Also, if you CAN'T add RAM, can you speed your storage?

Going from spinning-platter to SATA-SSD, or from SATA-SSD to NVMe, or from normal-NVMe to FAST-NVMe, would massively help your system's speed.

_ /\ _

This will work if you use emacs or vim. The problem is helix.