> If you want fast compile times then use a compiler w/ no optimization passes, done. The compile times are now linear w/ respect to lines of code & there is provably no further improvement you can make on that b/c any further passes will add linear or superlinear amount of overhead depending on the complexity of the optimization.

Umm this is completely wrong. Compiling involves a lot of stuff, and the language design, as well as compiler design can make or break them. Parsing is relatively easy to make fast and linear, but the other stuff (semantic analysis) is not. Hence why we have a huge range of compile times across programming languages that are (mostly) the same.