Depends on the change and the though given to header file dependencies.

PIMPL, forward declarations, pre-compiled headers, binary libraries are all tools to reduce such dependencies.

I think that only re-linking should be required if you only change source files and not headers. Headers implicitly convey are the sizes, inheritance and other stuff that dependencies need for compilation.

I suppose you could have some extra aggressive optimizations that force inlining, but I haven't seen a need for this, even in game dev.