[sievebrain]

I would be skeptical of that, but I wasn't able to find LOC/sec stats for the Go compiler(s) anywhere. If you can point me to LOC/sec performance figures, that'd be interesting.

Gradle/Maven don't do incremental compilation at the level of the file, so yes, they're gonna redo the whole thing each time. Use an IDE for that. IntelliJ will happily do incremental compilation in Java projects at the level of the individual file (and there's no relinking overhead).

I understand that you're saying the top languages are slow builders, but it's just not the case. It sounds like you've used tools which simply aren't optimised for build times and judging the language based on that. But I usually have roundtrip times between editing my code and running the recompiled program of about a second when working with Java.

[colin_mccabe]

I have used both Eclipse and Intellij for building Hadoop, and neither could get incremental compilation under 30 seconds. In fact, it was often much more than that. Eclipse was a huge pain to use with Hadoop because it was always getting something wrong-- many times when you updated the project dependencies, Eclipse would essentially break and need manual fixing. Even loading up the project in either IDE takes at least a solid minute, with an SSD, Intel i7, and 16 GB of RAM.

Prior to using Java, I used C++ for 10 years. Every project I worked on had compile time problems. It was an open secret that we spent most of our time waiting for compiles.

It's very common for people working on small projects to feel good about their compile times. But sometimes projects grow up, and they outgrow the language and the tools they were designed in.