Compiling fast has ripple effects throughout your workflow. Having your iteration time go from 1s to 5s is a massive difference: it can mean you break out of the flow state when you restart your server to test your code.

As someone dealing with Swift everyday (and, before that, faster langs like Elixir and Typescript), I can only agree. Sometimes my incremental builds take 20-30 seconds and it feels like a huge toll. Waiting on the CI (which is a weak machine) is up to 25 minutes until the test suite has passed - a large chunk of that being compilation time. Releases take 5-10 minutes.

I really like Swift, but I’d highly appreciate faster compilation times.

Swift compilation is slower than C++.

C++ with heavy template use or C++ as glorified C-with-classes?

C++ with heavy template use.

Once you use a language where compile times are essentially invisible, it’s hard to go back.