Considering its simplicity, I wonder why st fared so poorly. Also, I’m surprised that eshell did well on the latency part, since it sometimes feels laggy (which could be due to its reimplementation of basic Unix tools in elisp).
I don't understand why in earth you would expect simple solutions to be fast. Most very fast software need some level of complexity in order to special-case for the fast platform primitives. See for instance glibc which is not simple when compared to musl but also rolls over it in benchmarks, because it uses many state of the art algorithms and many architecture-specific optimizations.
That’s unnecessarily aggressive.
You can easily get st down to 5-7ms latency by tuning the fps settings in config.h. Also the shell running inside it makes quite a difference
I am also very surprised at the eshell performance, how on earth is it faster than most terminals written in C? Elisp is the slowest language ever.