People state that all of these compile-time abstractions that many languages offer are worth the cost because they allow for loads of "zero-cost" abstractions. However, this compile-time tradeoff people describe as being good would be fine if it were real. In practice, virtually none of the long-compile-time projects I've worked on ever produced a program that was fast, or whose size anyone cared about. You pay the cost of compile time and don't get the performance. People state this hypothesis as if it is fact, even when the evidence shows it is wrong. The other cost nobody accounts for is developer iteration speed. If your builds take 1 second, you program in a fundamentally different style than if they take 6 minutes. And I've yet to see a style that justifies 6-minute builds, even on medium-to-large projects. Our projects at work are Odin, 500–700 KLOC, and they compile in 1–2 seconds; Not MINUTES. Compile-times are something people get used to, and they don't realize how bad it is until they experience another project (or language) that is orders of magnitude faster. We should not be putting up with slow things based on a provably false hypothesis.