In C we had to resort to tricks like precompiled headers to get any sort of sensible compilation and it still lasted a minute for a decent library.

C++ was/is even worse what with generation of all the templated code and then through the roof link times for linker to sort out all the duplicate template implementations (ok, Solaris had a different approach but I guess that's a nitpick).

I have not worked on any large project in Pascal, but friends worked with Delphi and I remember them complaining how slow it was.

So, in my experience, it really was slow.