[flohofwoe]

As soon as you include C++ stdlib headers (even only for the stdlib features you're actually using), you have tens- to hundreds-of-thousands of lines of complex template code in front of your own code, and this in each compilation unit. In the end your own code is maybe one percent of all the code the C++ compiler needs to work through each time something is compiled (depending on how many source files you have, this is also why unity builds - merging all source files into one - are so much faster in C++).

In comparison, CRT headers (when compiled as C, not as C++, as in that case additional C++ bloat is added) are usually a few dozen to a few hundred lines of simple declaration code. Compared to C++, it's very hard to make a C project compile slowly.