Earlier quoted context omitted.
Modern C++ is indeed pretty productive. It's the tooling and compile times that hold it back.
Perhaps you mean link time? If you're spending a lot of time compiling you are probably suffering from other problems. Most of C++'s issues with compilation come from needing to re-compile entire .cpp files because of a change in a depending .h file. If you properly forward your class declarations instead of including a header in a .h file, don't do template meta meta magic, and think about physical design a bit, you…
Modern C++ style generally requires making a whole bunch of little functions and classes and counting on them to be inlined and SROA'd away. This works remarkably well for runtime, but it exacts a big compilation performance hit simply because you're optimizing so much code.