I think I finally know what I want in a compiled programming language, a fast compiler. I get the feeling that this is a really superficial thing to care about but some time after switching from Java to Scala for a while I realized that being able to make a small change in code and immediately run the program is actually quite important to me. Besides Java and Go I don’t know of any languages that really value compile speed.
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Delphi/Object Pascal. Make a change, press F9 and it runs – you don’t even notice the compile time. A full rebuild of a fairly substantial project that we run takes of the order of 10-20 seconds, even on a fairly wimpy machine
There’s an open source variant available at http://www.freepascal.org. I’ve not messed with it but it reportedly is just as fast – it’s the design of the Pascal language that allows this.