I think the go team does deserve credit for making compilation speed a priority when other languages of the same generation have tended not to.

Sure, but lets not pretend that is something they came up with, unique to Go toolchain.

Lots of languages have fantastic compile speed, they've just decided to have their compilers do a lot more work.

You can argue that fast compilation IS a feature and that new language options should be evaluated, but it's unfair to say it's "not a priority" even for languages like Scala.

> they've just decided to have their compilers do a lot more work

This. Compiling C++ would be a lot faster if you made the developer manually expand all the templates into tedious boilerplate before starting the compiler, but it's not a good tradeoff to make.