While Turbo Pascal had P-code interpreters for competition at the time, I was making a more general statement. As far as I can remember, or could tell at the time, it was the best CP/M natively hosted high level language period. At the time I had paid hundreds of dollars (hobby/moonlight work 1980s dollars) for an IBM Fortran compiler and for the Microsoft family of compilers (Basic, Fortran, COBOL (!!!!) and the associated Assembler). Working off of 8 inch floppy drives, the high price commercial compilers had a one hour turn around, and no IDE. So you used your favorite editor, submitted the code, watched the lights flash for a long time, eventually got code to load and try. There was an off ramp about a half hour in if the parser found syntax errors. Most of an hour before you could see if your code worked. Turbo Pascal was $39.95, had an IDE, generated executable code in well under 5 minutes and had enough extensions on the teaching language to let you get at the hardware bits if you needed to. GCC and its ilk was more than a decade in the future, and the early incarnations of GCC were not friendly to those who didn't breath it full time. Turbo Pascal had warts, and yes memory usage was one, but it was a bush in a field of grass. Now there are trees and the bush looks small, but it ruled the era.
There might have been (probably were) better cross compilers running on PDP-8s, PDP-11s, HP 1000s or the IBM 370s or Burroughs 8700s, but that wasn't the real world for most people who weren't being paid to do microprocessor development. Even for those of us who were, many of our employers didn't look fondly on doing things other than what we were paid to do, so our home fun was restricted to the compilers hosted on the one of the microcomputers of the time.