For me, I'm seeing compile times averaging around 5-10 seconds, with outlier builds taking up to 40 seconds if the files in question aren't cached.
It feels faster than Go, but I think part of that is down to Nim's compile output being verbose by default.
Nim's compilation is much faster than Go.
As someone that compared both a while back (and a biased Nim core developer) I don't think this claim is true. Go is really fast at compilation, but honestly Nim is good enough.
Do you mean compile times for Nim or a project? It's accurate to test it yourself since it's free.
Projects of any note are notoriously hard to test for yourself since they often use build systems. Golang is nice in this respect, pretty easy and fast.
Nim projects typically use `nimble` that ships with the install. So all you would need to do is `nimble build` in the root folder and voilà! Of course that also pulls the dependencies from the package manager, so you might want to just extract the build step from the `.nimble` file if you wanted to time just the compilation.
It's fast, even when you use generics or metaprogramming.