If you're not careful about how you organise your C++ code (be careful what you put in headers, don't go crazy with templates), compiling can get really slow, even for relatively small projects.
Just #include <iostream> and the compiler needs to process 37,799(!) lines and more than a MB of data:
echo '#include <iostream>' | g++ -E -x c++ - | wc
37799 104779 1280834
To contrast in C: echo '#include <stdio.h>' | gcc -E -x c - | wc
456 1638 20880
Comparing the compile times of PostgreSQL (C, minutes on an old laptop) and MySQL (C++, 30+ minutes) is also instructive.Maybe when modules are finally introduced, things will improve.