I consider this a major hindrance for productivity.
Fast iteration/test cycle is the best way to stay in the flow while fixing small bugs on the go.
I'd say the limit for me is about five seconds, but I find it much better when I can keep it below one second.
I think that Jai is engineered to have fast compilation in debug mode, I hope that will be the case once released.
But the other part was the reaction amongst developers to this. Layers of abstractions introduced just to please the compiler gods. C++ was particular famous for this, all for the sake of partial compilation still working -- sometimes this had the benefits of decoupling, but often it was a few cake layers on top of that.
So you end up with convenient languages, but have to forsake some of that convenience to actually be productive. But you still had to learn the convenient unused part and know the difference, even if you almost never could afford to use it (if it's just about runtime performance, you often don't need that. But you don't want to cause the projects compilation or test phase to double, just because that functional-combinatoric template metaprogramming approach is so much neater)
Oh man, if only we would have Wirth-dows, not Windows ;)
I think they are making a PR mistake by not making it more open, but I would be surprised if it is never released.
https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/89#issuecomment-122118...
Although I'm not sure the "self hosted compiler" is the same as "llvm free backend".