alt Hacker NewsLol this isn't unique nor out of the norm - most big C++ projects are like this, and certainly every one in my industry(video games), unless you're trying to make an argument that C++ is somehow not commonly used. I even worked on a small indie game in C++ and it took 5 minutes minimum to compile.
C++ is common, but game programming definitely isn't the norm.
And 5 min is very different from 40 mins. Don't pretend a factor of 8 isn't insignificant
I've also worked on systems which are entirely written with template metaprogramming. This is definitely not the norm. Though that code was highly focused on optimization, as we were writing for HPC environments (extremely heterogeneous hardware). Sure, a full compile could take quite some time but doing a full compile, or even compiling a decent portion, when developing would be insane. A partial compile of a few minutes usually meant my time was better spent mucking about with the cmake and build files because incremental testing sped up development and your PRs aren't going to be merged quickly if they take an hour to verify if they even compile.