afaik it has none of the costly compiling passes..

Transformer, checker, markused, binary generation are not costly?

It takes GCC this much time to generate an unoptimized hello world.

i could never find any data on what would allow v to save so much time. i genuinely tried to find objective information, not kneejerk hate. you're the author it seems, so maybe you can give some hints ? i don't believe gcc is the absolute best, but even clang (I didn't check other languages/compilers) was lagging behind in the benchmarks which made me doubt it was not just comparing apple and oranges.