> Does some aspect address a development pain point of yours?

I've worked in a company with a large codebase, but we did all development on the server. Devex teams automatically set up artefact caching so builds would be fast. I guess this is what you're trying to replicate. I think others have tried it as well. Maybe it would be worth reaching out to Josh Triplett (https://github.com/joshtriplett) who was working on something similar.

In my current company (using Go) or personal projects (using Rust) I don't feel this pain at all. For the codebases I work on, Apple's M series chips are great.

> source available

I don't think this would help. Ultimately, it's a trust issue. Most people, me included, are used to getting Rust through rustup or their package manager. Downloading and using a fork is too much friction, and any security expert will strongly advise against it. Using a compiler binary built by someone else requires a lot of trust.

Being on a fork has other issues - there might be subtle issues like miscompilations that only I experience, instead of benefiting from the bug reports filed by the whole community. The compiler built by the Rust team is tested against every open source crate, there's no way a fork could do that kind of testing. Speed is another issue - 60% of all Rust developers are on the latest stable release (lib.rs/stats), so a majority upgrades asap. Waiting for a rebase and a release is just too late for all these people.

If anyone could have succeeded with a fork, it is the Sealed Rust initiative by Ferrous Systems. They were targeting customers who prefer to stick with one version of a toolchain for years. It would have been technically feasible for them to fork, add their special sauce and pass it on. But even they decided against it, upstreaming all their changes. I think it comes down to the work of maintaining a fork in perpetuity and the distrust of closed source.

> I assume a similar willingness if/when someone's macro expansions are slow.

I think by this time next year most users will see a 30-40% increase in compilation perf thanks to parallel frontend, cranelift and switch to lld. I'm sure no one would say no to additional speedups, but they won't be desperate for increased performance.

> there is a lack of people improving the Rust dev experience

I think the number of people working on the three projects I mentioned, GCC backend, GCC frontend, cargo improvements (like the strip debug info change you mentioned) - that's a lot of improvement. This is the general stuff, so I'm not counting the specific work like making Rust better for embedded or Linux kernel development. Seems like a lot of good work happening in parallel.

I don't want to discourage you, but I'll leave you with this - even if you found enough people to adopt your forked changes (source available or not) and pay for it, that would just be a signal to the open source project that its a really good idea to clean room reimplement your changes. Competing with an incumbent is hard, competing with an open source incumbent when you're not open source - I've never seen it done successfully.

As a Rust user, I'd love to see you contribute this back to Rust and for Rust to become better. But I also understand your need to make a living. Best of luck.