So yeah, the last stable build of OpenSCAD is over 4 years old as of this writing.
Nightly (Dev) builds of OpenSCAD have seen 100x speed improvements since that release, when enabling the Manifold backend (see this presentation).
If you can install a Dev build instead of the stable version, you should! (then, pass --backend=manifold
if using in Command line, or switch the renderer from slow CGAL to Manifold in the UI settings if using the UI; see instructions here).
If you can't install the Dev build, well, you kinda can (for command-line use only, and if you have Docker): put the openscad
script below in your PATH, and you're good to go (make sure it's executable w/ chmod +x path/to/openscad
).
Oh, and on MacOS some projects that use OpenSCAD assume its binary is in /Applications/OpenSCAD.app/Contents/MacOS/OpenSCAD