Compile times are an overblown concern, not because compile times don't matter, but because generics don't equate to long compile times. Two things: 1. Talking

Compile times are an overblown concern, not because compile times don't matter, but because generics don't equate to long compile times. Two things: 1. Talking about C++ doesn't prove anything about the effects of generics on compilation time. C++ doesn't have generics, it has templates. Also, C++ is a particularly difficult language to compile quickly--it shouldn't be hard to compile a language faster than C++, even if you completely ignore templates/generics. If you want to make a reasonable comparison to Go's compilation, you should be looking at Java or C#. I've worked on an 800,000 line Java project and a 500,000 line C# project (the second made very heavy use of generics). The first took about two hours to build completely from scratch, the second, 40 minutes (both on not-particularly-powerful desktop workstations--the difference in time also is affected by the fact that there was 5 years between these projects). And like I said, typical builds of only changed code took <30 seconds. 2. I already said this, so I'll just quote myself: "If your builds are taking so long that server time becomes an issue, your code has built up too much cruft and it's time to refactor to reduce your size (failure to do this will cause much bigger problems than slow compilation)." 4.2 megabytes of code means that no one can reason effectively about the system, especially in a language as dense as C++.