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Anyway, this costs ~1-2 minutes of time on my machine, could be longer on less powerful ones. Not that significant, but in a CI set up this feels a little wasteful and wasn't sure what others' suggest for this?

I remember pip had an issue with the M1 architecture when it was released which didn't allow for the use of pre-compiled packages, not sure if it was ever addressed...
I remember reading a couple of PEPs at the time, but didn't follow up later...

actually, never mind... I think I got it mixed up with the glibc/musl PEP around the same time M1 came out:
<https://peps.python.org/pep-0656/>

Do you have wheel installed in your global environment? It’s way quicker if you do 

Not in the venv, it needs to be on your global python path 

Are you saying to install the wheel globally (the package) so it gets pulled by pip for the venv, instead of rebuilding all the time?