> These design decisions often reflect the design of the language itself, which is to say that some languages are more amenable to fast compilation than others

> These design decisions often reflect the design of the language itself, which is to say that some languages are more amenable to fast compilation than others and I suspect that Zig is at best average or slightly above average for languages of similar expressivity. Extremely correct. In particular, if care isn't taken at the initial design phase of a language to ensure compilation isn't slow, it's likely going to end up being just that. Much in the same way untested code is likely to be incorrect. Note that I used "isn't slow" instead of "is fast" deliberately. You don't need to, nor should, stress about low-level optimizations, you just need to get the high-level design right. A poorly written quicksort will run circles around the most optimized bubble sort.