You can look back at least as far as Ada83 to find a specification for a library manager as part of the system, where precompiled modules are stored in a format that lends itself to faster compilation.
However the Ada library manager has a reputation for being complicated, slow, and fragile. Gnat was able to compile Ada much faster by using a C-style compilation model instead!
https://dwheeler.com/essays/make-it-simple-dewar.html
Oh, definitely, but just because the implementation sucks doesn't mean that the idea isn't there.
Modula-3 was also pretty slow compiling, but it also compiled interfaces so that it could refer to them. Unfortunately, the underlying objects could change during a compilation because of partial revelation, so parts of the system would have to be recompiled when the builder found those cases. I'm sure Modula-2 could have been faster in that regard, not having the opportunity for a type to be elaborated more in later compilation units.
