While what you're saying might be true, I can't help but think about Pascal units and say: "It didn't have to be this hard! We solved this problem 40 years ago!"
Which is a language I absolutely adore, and am building a homomorphic encryption based product leveraging Hyperledger on a rather obscure 160 hardware thread POWER8 server; it can definitely work for real production tasks today, even if some parts are rough (and hell, C++ can be rough too). Parallel compilation on this machine is stupidly quick :)
Any pointers to what power hardware you are running?
You don't need pointers - just follow the fan noise from wherever you are.
Sorry, it's the same in Delphi (Pascal successor). The compilation time goes up exponentially as number of units goes up. Compilation of 2.000 files (750.000 lines) takes about 20 minutes.
With the caveat that one doesn't need to do "make world" every time a few files change.
Yes there are plenty of other solutions if you use other languages, but I decided to constrain myself to how you'd address it in C++
And then Modula-2 came along and... well, it was mostly the same. But the compactness of Pascal output left fond memories.