There are ways to speed up compilation. It can be done in parallel, and you can get a lot of cores into a developer desktop these days. Plus you can get unlimited amounts of distributed cores in the cloud. Compilation can also be sped up with pre-compiled headers, which will soon be replaced with C++20 modules which will help compilation improve in the future as compilers improve their support for modules. With incremental compilation, you do not need recompile the whole project after every change. Linking in large statically linked binaries is a big bottleneck, but incremental linking is possible in some cases. You can also break your project into multiple shared libraries (DLLs) , and link dynamically at run-time for debugging. It can then be re-built with static linking for a release build. Continuous Integration systems can also help hide the latency of compilation from developers by continuously running build and test processes in the background on a cluster.
> There are ways to speed up compilation. It can be done in parallel, and you can get a lot of cores into a developer desktop these days.
I'd start with the very basics, such as using forward declarations, encapsulation, and the pimpl idiom to not drag unnecessary #includes into your translation units.
Also, the compilation bottleneck sometimes lies in IO, thus moving your build folder to a RAM drive can speed up things significantly with zero effort.
