compile time speed

[timotheecour]

• would be nice to have a more comprehensive answer regarding compile time difference, in different scenarios, and using real world examples

(ported from #11 (comment))

• There is the Faster Command Line Tool in <insert language> benchmark that was started by the D community, Nim also replicated it, TL;DR D and Nim had the same speed and same compilation time.

EDIT

• see also: https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/3726 could Nim benefit from upcoming C++ modules to speedup compilation times?

[marler8997]

Note that the example in the NIM article was only with 1 source file. Because Nim compiles to C, it suffers from the same scalability compile-time issues that C suffers from. The core issue being that every source file is compiled in its own universe, where everything that is referenced needs to be redefined for every source file. I believe Nim tries to mitigate this by only defining whatever is being used by the file, which helps, but can't compete with a solution where analyzed code is "reused" instead of "redefined" with every source file.