How does Go compile so quickly?

While most of the above is true, there is one very important point that was not really mentionend: Dependency management.

Go only needs to include the packages that you are importing directly (as those already imported what they need). This is in stark contrast to C/C++, where every single file starts including x headers, which include y headers etc. Bottom line: Go's compiling takes linear time w.r.t to the number of imported packages, where C/C++ take exponential time.