There are various solutions to compile times in C++ that have been talked about at length over the years. Lakos' book from 1996 talks about this. In fact, a l

There are various solutions to compile times in C++ that have been talked about at length over the years. Lakos' book from 1996 talks about this. In fact, a lot of modern software engineering guidelines come from working around C++'s built in shortcomings. Use things such as the Pimpl idiom to help linking. Modular libraries rather than big-ball-of-mud, do you really need to recompile world+dog each time? Top-down includes, and no relative includes, isolating your code. In fact go-lang does exactly this. The trouble is that in C++, fast compile times need to be designed into the code base and often enforced by scripts. I don't think that there's any other language that requires so much 'non-language' engineering as C++.