Yes. your link times will grow. But link times are not depended on choice of language. It depends on how big your set of object files is. Depending on your platform you can optimize your build.
I.e.
- use dynamic link libraries
- use create static libraries
- carefully manage your dependencies. i.e. only include what you actually need.
- hot reload game logic (where quick iteration is more important)
There's a lot of tricks you can do to optimize build times, and I've tried most of them in my previous game engine. Got ~90kloc recompilation time from 15min to something like a few minutes, although that required rewriting a bunch of code to not use templates. And removing boost. Multiple days' work.
But the point is, that I'd like a language that is fast to compile by default. C seems pretty promising, as doing a full unity build of my 25kloc codebase takes something like 3 seconds. Not sure how much of that is actually compilation, and how much IO. I'm expecting the project to grow to something like 100-200kloc, and hopefully never have to spend time figuring out why the compilation takes too long, and instead use that time to do something productive.
I.e. - use dynamic link libraries
- use create static libraries
- carefully manage your dependencies. i.e. only include what you actually need.
- hot reload game logic (where quick iteration is more important)
- compile cache.
- ssd disk
- fast processor
- and yes, agreed. 100kloc is still small.