The compilation phase can take hours in C++. Up to a day when compiling huge projects will all the optimization flags.
Live that for some time and it will quickly prove you that you were wrong. Compilation time matters.
Slow compilation: more than a minute (makes to start browsing HN, missing the end, thus losing even more time)
To have fast compilation even with big projects is hard. Go, C, and D are usually fast. Scala is usually slow.
I care about development builds primarily. The edit-compile-test loop must be really really fast. Optimization flags are irrelevant, because if performance matters you often must have them enabled for development as well.
> Slow compilation: more than a minute (makes to start browsing HN, missing the end, thus losing even more time)
See the thread here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/409611/desktop-notification-...
TL;DR install undistract-me, add 2 lines to bashrc, and you will get a desktop popup when a command that takes longer than 10 seconds to complete is finished.
Fedora does this by default on install and I have found it so handy. Kick off a compile etc, then just browse HN/reddit til I get the popup.
[0] https://github.com/qznc/dot/blob/master/config/fish/config.f...
But you do have a point. Things are so much better now than when I started programming 50 years ago. Machines and languages are so much better. Programming is a dream compared to back then.