One could argue that anything that anything that makes the development process itself more efficient, as opposed to the compiling, is worth it since programmers themselves ain’t getting any faster anytime soon, but timing out after more than 40 seconds on a state-of-the-art CPU because of a handful of lines is just ridiculous.
At the very least it seems like the compiler could math out how many possible states it is about to check and if the value is unreasonable instantly error out instead of trying to chew on it for over half a minute before giving up.
Deltas and caches need some work too. It's a little unfortunate that my compile time is more affected by the amount of code that didn't change than the code I changed.
One of the features of Rational was that it would distribute precompiled headers around. Whoever changed the header files had to pay to recompile them, but everyone else just got the results instead.
