“The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.”
Yet Turbo Pascal for MS-DOS, with more features than Go has currently, did already have faster compile times on those clunky 8086 CPUs, let alone on modern 21st century hardware.
Fast compilation times in Go are only a surprise for a generation that never used native programming languages with native support for modules.
As for C++ compilation times, yes they are an abomination when doing make world from scratch, including third party dependencies, with heavy template code.
However modules are around the corner and they were just voted into C++20.
-- Rob Pike