What does Rust's lack of incremental compilation mean, exactly?

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This question was asked before Rust officially supported incremental compilation. Rust 1.24.0 and later enable incremental compilation by default for development (debug) builds.

I'm an outsider trying to see if Rust is appropriate for my projects.

I've read that Rust lacks incremental compilation (beta features notwithstanding).

  1. Is this similar to having everything be implemented in the headers in C++ (like in much of Boost)?

  2. If the above is correct, does this limit Rust to rather small projects with small dependencies? (If, say, Qt or KDE were header-only libraries, then programs using them would be extremely painful to develop, since you'd effectively recompile Qt/KDE every time you want to compile your own code.)

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