Interesting anecdote, I was writing a ray tracer recently and instead of using real recursion I tried using a recursive template instead (because who needs i-cache). Basically, every bounce of a ray was a different function with <current_bounce + 1> until <max_bounces>.

The actual ray-tracing code wasn't that long at all, but if you turned max_max_bounces up (say, 100+) "code-gen" time in visual studio blew up to over one minute. That was the moment when I appreciated what everyone was saying about C++ compile times being quite slow if you (mis)use templates.