Are those real numbers? Yikes. I mean, I don't disbelieve it, it's just a reminder about how far we've fallen. Modern compilers are indeed amazing tools, but those last 8-10% of features (performance, safety, etc...) have come at an absolutely staggering price.
And clang isn't really that big an offender, being only a tiny bit slower than GCC. C++ and Rust are a solid order of magnitude slower still.
Plan 9 is similar: a full system rebuild takes about 45 seconds on my hardware. A clang (and just a clang build) build on similar hardware takes about 2 hours.
I just don't get how the gulf can be this wide on something so many devs are clearly frustrated about.
Modern optimizing compilers are solving lots of hoary computational graph problems, etc., behind the scenes.
This had NOTHING to do with
> those last 8-10% of features (performance, safety, etc...) have come at an absolutely staggering price
SAS C had better generated code and more features.
It was purely a question of architecture - SAS C was architected for speed, and actively used caches (especially precompiled header files) to avoid re-doing work. GCC didn't, and I've seen no hint of that appearing in GCC since.