There is no way to use the STL and other template code and still have reasonably sized projects do full builds in seconds. That's just an empirical fact. The on

There is no way to use the STL and other template code and still have reasonably sized projects do full builds in seconds. That's just an empirical fact. The only way to get C-like compile times is to essentially write C, with minor additions. If you genuinely regard the standard library as a productivity blessing I'm sure this looks like an unreasonable tradeoff. I would be very surprised to see someone advocate writing "Orthodox C++" solely for the compile times. Most of us who write code like this do so because we don't find value in the STL and regard templates as an extremely poor tool for their ostensible purpose. The compile times are just a bonus, albeit a very pleasant one. In truth, the divide isn't between people who prioritize compile times over any other consideration and people who don't. It's between people who see most of the language features of C++ as valuable and people who see them as mostly unhelpful. Personally, I like operator overloading for math and SIMD types, function overloading for less verbosity, namespaces and a bit of constexpr for convenience. The rest I'm quite happy to do without, so there isn't much of a tradeoff to make.