Somehow programmers have come to accept that a minuscule change in a single function that only result in a few bytes changing in a binary takes forever to compile and link. Compilation and linking should be basically instantaneous. So fast that you don't even realize there is a compilation step at all.

Sure, release builds with whole program optimization and other fancy compiler techniques can take longer. That's fine. But the regular compile/debug/test loop can still be instant. For legacy reasons compilation in systems languages is unbelievably slow but it doesn't have to be this way.