[BuuQu9hu]

Hi! Unfortunately, compilers must take at least linear time to compile code, because they must examine every character. Ditto for pretty much any serializer. Also, you'd think that the number of LoC matters, but the choice of language matters too; look how long it takes to compile terse high-level languages like Haskell. Finally, as you probably already know, many steps of a build are non-parallelizeable, and as others have already pointed out, even a task like linking a binary can take multiple minutes at scale.