Go absolutely does incremental builds by default and has been like that since I can remember. Packages are only rebuilt when their source or their dependencies

Go absolutely does incremental builds by default and has been like that since I can remember. Packages are only rebuilt when their source or their dependencies change. Same for tests which are cached by default so during typical development only a subset of tests are executed and compilation time can be a big part. Leave full tests for CI. An anecdote I found from 5 years ago: On my 1.7GHz processor it takes 10 seconds to build the whole standard library from scratch (300k lines of code). It's fast AF.