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Wait, it's fast because they didn't include incremental compilation?

It's fast because of dependency analysis. They forgot about something called incremental compilation.

This is what they should have spent their 20% on: https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/IncrementalCompiler

So why is the Go compiler still faster than compilers that do have incremental compilation? The implications of your wording is confusing.

Also, Go does have incremental compilation at the package level.

their wording was confusing; they were being sarcastic, implying that the go developers made compilation of a project from scratch so fast because they weren't aware of incremental compilation (which is a false assertion, I assure you).

Actually they do have incremental compilation at the package level. Use go install and you'll get it. Use go build and you throw away intermediate build artifacts so you don't get it. This is all documented.

In practice compilation times are not a pain point for golang.

Even better, `go get ./...` installs all dependent packages.

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