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If whatever development system you are using is showing signs of being slow to start, I would say it is time to find a better, faster alternative?

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I start emacs maybe once every 3 months if I have to reboot or something. Then it just runs constantly. The article is an interesting exercise but hardly important to optimize away 3 or 4 seconds a quarter.

Exactly, I always have an Emacs window (with tons of buffers, split screens) running.

I'd argue that startup time is very low on the list of things you want from your development system. Sure, quicker startup time is better, so improve it if you can, but you being productive in it once it's up is a lot more important, for example.

> I'd argue that startup time is very low on the list of things you want from your development system.

Depends on what part of your "development system" you're talking about. If your test suite takes a minute to load before it will even execute a single test, I'd argue that you might want to see what can be done about it.

The shell is my development system. The editor is a small part of it. Starting it should be as fast as, say, opening a window in an IDE.

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