Comment by James_K

The idea is that software would only be shipped if it actually works, and part of this would be ensuring it compiles. I'm not suggesting we use Make files or some other foul approach like that. Code should ideally be distributed as a single zip file with an executable header that triggers it to be unpacked in some cache directory by a program analogous to the linker, and compiled by the simple process of compiling all source files. Additionally this could be sped up drastically by having the compiler be a single executable with uniform flags across files. Header files could be parsed once and shared between build threads in parallel, which alone would safe much work on the part of the compiler. If this still proves insufficient, a language with superior semantics to C could be chosen which can be compiled faster. Most code these days shipped is JS which is compiled on the user's computer. This would be an order of magnitude improvement on that from a performance perspective.