[jungler]

It's not the compile times that keep C codebases slim, it's the primitive build system. There's no notion of modules, so every project has to cobble together an equivalent thing, generally relying on make, autotools and its successors, and the result is both incompatible across projects and incompatible across slightly different build environments.

It's a failing of the Unix model with a small silver lining in that C projects tend to go out of their way not to have to make the build any harder than it already is.