[jimbokun]

"In the first place, "we can't compile our code on every change because it takes too long" is a really awful situation to be in."

Isn't this exactly the problem Go was invented to solve?

[kornish]

It was one of them. However, given the other writing/talks Facebook has put out about their usage of Haskell and Haxl, Go is probably not a good fit for their use case due to language expressivity concerns (not declarative enough, not enough type safety, not syntactically flexible enough for writing DSLs).

[tazjin]

It "solves" it by not doing any of the things that you'd expect a modern language's compiler to do.

In my opinion the time wasted debugging Go issues that could have been statically prevented is better spent waiting for a slightly longer compile cycle to finish.

[pjmlp]

No because fast compile times were already solved in the 70's, when using languages like CLU, UCSD Pascal, Mesa and Modula-2.

The authors might have done it in regards to waiting for C++ builds, but the problem was not a problem for those using other programming languages.