There is roughly 1-2s (after sbt warm-up) penalty to perform compilation to native on iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015) with 4 GHz Intel Core i7. The linker is highly parallel so you can throw more hardware at it as your project grows bigger. Barebones project includes nearly 1000 classes and 2000 methods in transitive dependencies that are being compiled due to closed-world nature of the toolchain.