Comment by comex

Contrary to other replies, I think this is a reasonable concern. For example, the traditional C model allowed people to relatively easily write wrappers that do transparent caching (ccache) and parallelism (distcc), which is harder with a more integrated model.

Except:

> Aren't we giving up too much to get faster recommendations in IDEs?

The goal of incremental compilation isn't just IDE recommendations. It's faster compile times. C's system of header files and file-level dependency tracking works for C, but modern C++ severely strains its limits, considering how templates often force you to put all your code in header files. Rust doesn't even have header files and uses a single compilation unit for an entire library, which is much worse… but Rust is working on fine-grained query-based incremental compilation, which might someday let it leapfrog C++ in rebuild times.

Maybe.