I couldn't get zig to magically speed up my compile times, either; I've been
using [zapcc](https://github.com/yrnkrn/zapcc) for some time now, which is
noticeably quicker than gcc. I tried it on your suggest.nim and got:
gcc: 4.5s
zapcc: 3.4s
tcc: 1.7s
Run
of that, the Nim compilation is like 1.7s. tcc is just stupidly fast.
on `bench.c` i get:
gcc: 0.03
tcc: 0.004
zapcc(cold): 0.2
zapcc(hot): 0.04
Run
so, not a replacement for what tcc does, but i can recommend it for when you
want a 'real' compiler.