>>C++ is common, but game programming definitely isn't the norm.

I mean, last time I checked there are hundreds of thousands of programmers working in this industry, and video games are a bigger industry than movies. What's not the norm about it, exactly? I imagine there's more programmers out there making video games than making accounting software, for example.

>>And 5 min is very different from 40 mins. Don't pretend a factor of 8 isn't insignificant

I'm sorry, I'm confused. Did I ever imply otherwise? Maybe let me say it again, clearer - so far I worked at 2 big AAA studios, on 5 big AAA franchises, in 4 different engines. All 5 of those had those multi-hour compilation times unless you used something like Incredibuild or Fastbuild, and every single one of them had a startup of around 10+ minutes if you made any change to the code at all, just for VS to finish compilation and linking. I also worked at a small indie studio, with its own C++ engine, we had maybe...200 files max? That project took 5 minutes to build. Don't know where you got the idea that I'm saying factor of 8 is insignificant.

>> your PRs aren't going to be merged quickly if they take an hour to verify if they even compile.

Hmm at the current project the time from me submitting a change to it actually being accepted is ~6 hours. On my previous projects I think the fastest I've seen has been around an hour for a very very quick preflight. But then all the tests also have to pass which takes a lot of time.

>>ure, a full compile could take quite some time but doing a full compile, or even compiling a decent portion, when developing would be insane.

Right, but you have to do this at least once when you get latest, normally in the morning I grab latest and have to build around ~9000 files. If I make a change in the gameplay code it might have to recompile ~200-300 files because of the dependencies on all the associated systems.