I don't know about Him, but at least when working with C++ I feel the compile time is entirely up to deliberate tradeoffs. With better planning and more effort made with forward headers, better implementation boundaries w/pimpl like constructs, and otherwise linking, and avoiding meta-programming entirely, I've not found it to be an issue.

Incremental C++ builds can be lightning fast, or it can be ridiculously slow. I've worked on large projects where change + incremental compile + test was less than 5 seconds. And I've worked with project where no effort was made where the same could take 10 minutes.