[qppo]

I think it's fairly naive to say build times get long "only if you mess with the type system" whatever that means. It's pretty easy to tank your compile/edit/debug cycle just by adding or removing things to a header file. Maybe modules will improve things.

I've worked in C++ code bases with just a few 100k loc where one starts architecting the software to avoid long compile times. Think about how insane that is, you choose to write and structure code differently as punishment for the sin of writing new code. Not to improve the software performance or add new features.

The worst example of this is the pimpl pattern. You make th explicit choice to trade off compile times to hide everything behind a pointer dereference that is almost guaranteed to be opaque to the compiler, even after LTO, so the only "inlining" you may see is from the branch predictor on a user's machine. That's bonkers!

[jfkebwjsbx]

Of course compile times increase with code size, that is not what people are talking about when they say "X language compiles slowly". They are talking about time per code size.

Messing with the type system is using it for things you really should not in any reasonable project. For instance, some of the Boost libs with their overgeneralizations that 99% of users do not need.

[ByteJockey]

>"only if you mess with the type system" whatever that means

I think they're talking about the STL.

[eloff]

Boost.