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Comment by vdupras | Hacker News Reader

That is both a sweeping generalization and plainly wrong. The "much earlier" days of programming had blazing fast compilers, like Turbo Pascal. The "earlier" days had C compiler that were plenty fast. Only languages like C++ had this kind of problem.

Worst offenders like Rust are "today", not "earlier".

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I am old enough to remember a time when compilation could last minutes or even one hour, depending on what you compiled, and it was in the late 1980s.

Certainly, but that depended on your own choices in technologies. This condition is not time-dependent. You can inflict yourself the exact same condition by choosing Rust.

Compile times are faster now for C and C++ right? Some of it due to further compiler optimizations but mostly due to higher CPU power.

Still, you seem to be arguing that the choice should be Pascal instead of Rust. There is a reason why we choose these new languages: language features. Compile time is a lesser consideration.

No, I'm arguing that having more "blocking" time is not a function of time (early days of programming), but a self-inflicted choice. Yes, choosing C in the 80s meant self-inflicting yourself with "blocking" time, but there was the choice of Turbo Pascal, or Forth or whatever. Plenty of great choices that ran really fast on those old machines.

Do I mean that one should choose Pascal today? No, compiling C code today is really fast and has practically no "blocking" time. But you can still inflict yourself "blocking" time if you want, with languages like Rust.

Are things clearer now?

In C we had to resort to tricks like precompiled headers to get any sort of sensible compilation and it still lasted a minute for a decent library.

C++ was/is even worse what with generation of all the templated code and then through the roof link times for linker to sort out all the duplicate template implementations (ok, Solaris had a different approach but I guess that's a nitpick).

I have not worked on any large project in Pascal, but friends worked with Delphi and I remember them complaining how slow it was.

So, in my experience, it really was slow.

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