On the other hand, I think user time is more valuable than developer time and when building complex/efficient software expecting lightning builds isn't just unwarranted, it's selfish.
> I think user time is more valuable than developer time
Developers are users of their development tools.
> when building complex/efficient software expecting lightning builds isn't just unwarranted, it's selfish.
This is wrong. There is no rule that says that you cannot write fast applications with fast builds. It is just that we got used to C++'s slow build times.
This sort of thinking even falls flat on its face when you consider that C provides similar optimization opportunities as C++ (and in pretty much every modern compiler it uses the same backend and most - if not all - optimizations) while compiles much faster.
But beyond that most of the codebase of a decently sized application does not need more than the most basic of optimizations - it is only a tiny tiny fraction that needs that, yet with modern C/C++ (and most other) compilers, the entire codebase suffers for it (i think only Visual C++ allows you to control optimization settings on a per-function basis, but i haven't encountered any codebase that actually uses this outside of temporarily disabling optimizations for debugging and/or working around bugs).
Users typically want more features and lower cost a lot more than they want maximum performance. Faster builds help developers deliver more features at lower cost, so faster builds potentially have a bigger impact for users than faster software getting produced at the end of the build.
Yeah, but when there are other languages that also AOT compile to native code, with faster compiler toolchains, it is already a deciding factor when choosing languages.
