Last time people were ecstatic about go compilation speed, the speeds cited didn't even hold up well against gcc.. The go compiler is not very fast, but as you point out the features of the Go language makes it amenable to fast compilation.
What kills compilation performance for larger C/C++ projects is include hell and managing build dependencies, which as you point out is mitigated in language with modules.
I'll say it again: Go doesn't have generics because of implementation complexity. The tradeoff was against the additional complexity that our users would have to deal with.
right, because a big codebase to deal with the lack of generics doesnt add complexity at all.
you see, the problem with the complexity of a language isnt real. it is perfectly possible to avoid generics in c++ forever. but there will come a day when you think to yourself, was it really worth it to be this lazy?
then you take a peek and (assuming you understand generics by then enough to use it a little) suddenly half of what you have writen so far is for the bin.
You've said this several times. I believe you, but can you please link to your source? There aren't a lot of comparative compile time statistics out there. Last time I checked, dmd was quite fast regardless--maybe no longer faster than the Go compiler, but within the same ballpark.
[1] http://golang.org/doc/faq#What_is_the_purpose_of_the_project