I follow the tweet author (Per) and I know he's a big fan of building compilers in the style of Niklaus Wirth. I think the idea is that modern compilers generat

I follow the tweet author (Per) and I know he's a big fan of building compilers in the style of Niklaus Wirth. I think the idea is that modern compilers generate very inefficient code first, and then have many expensive optimization passes, while Wirth advocated for simpler compilers that just generated reasonably efficient code in a single pass. > parsing a somehow larger language That would also explain it, but I think it's appropriate to acknowledge the effect it has on compile times when you add complexity to the language. A lot of folks avoid C++ features (or the language entirely) simply because they would inflate compilation times too much, and it clearly wasn't a priority for the language committee when those features were added.