Actually this joke I think is "stolen" by a previous joke about 3d artists , because our rendering times can be way longer than compiling the most complex C++ code. Easily can reach months of rendering time.
Its a good joke, but it should be taken as it is , a joke and nothing more.
Because I happen to build blender from time to time which is 1 million lines of destruction code, aka C/C++ code. Compiling is not that bad. Sure C++ still is hog slow and outperformed 10 times by Pascal compilers which I think that even the Pharo compiler would have a hard time competing with. But makefiles are smart enough to compile and re link whatever it changes and not the whole project.
So each new commit I fetch for Blender produces a couple of seconds of compiling time. But the very first compile which compiles everything from scratch can reach even an hour and is not even a complete compile since I use many prebuilt libraries and some prebuilt dependencies.��