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This amazes me since I switched to go because its builds are so insanely fast and the module system is quite clean. Out of all the languages, go probably needs it the least!

I did use bazel long ago for c++ and it was quite good at it, but we didn’t have very many dependencies.

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There are plenty of native languages that compile Go fast, unfortunely the scripting language revolution, and too much focus on C and C++ tooling kind of messed it all up.

Rob Pike even has a talk about how fast ALGOL compilers used to take, naturally one needs to take into account the additional issue with reading punch cards, but still quite fast for early 1960's hardware.

Or Object Pascal and Modula-2 compilers in the early 1990's.

Eventually we (as in industry) started focusing on the wrong points.

I have warm fuzzies for way back when I coded in Turbo Pascal. Even on the 8086 I had at the time, compilation speed was incredibly fast even on midsized projects. Much faster than my day to day work with Go on an M3 Max.

I had to install it last night in DOSBox-X and compile the Breakout example project. The warm fuzzies are justified.

Here is Borland's marketing material bragging about Turbo Pascal 5.5 compile times, on those 640 KB MS-DOS PCs.

34 000 lines of code per minute!

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/borland/turbo_pascal/Turbo_Pascal_...

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