This seems too obvious to even comment, but timing the compilation of a no-op program doesn’t show much. The meaningful comparison would be compiling a C program that does the same thing as some Julia code with `gcc -O2`. Btw, you can also run Julia in `-O0` or even better `-O1` mode — Julia even uses these same flags at the command line. These low optimization modes are extremely snappy — time to first plot is no issue. Of course, if you want to run some compute intensive code, it’s much slower, which is why `-O1` isn’t the default.

This is not to dismiss the TTFP issue, just pointing out that your argument seems to be that gcc is faster than Julia, which is definitely not the case. Indeed, gcc is about the same speed as clang, which like Julia, uses LLVM. The way Julia uses LLVM is a bit different, but something would be very wrong if took Julia much longer to compile code with the same functionality as it takes gcc or clang. Julia spreads the compilation out over time, but when you do something complex, a lot of compilation happens all at once. However, a static compilation would not do this work any faster, static compilers just do the work in a separate phase rather than interleaved with execution.