Startup time is only relevant in specific cases, and doesn’t really reflect what most people think of as the language speed. It’s most important in serverless apps or similar cases where a small script is going to be called very frequently and the results are time critical, in most other cases it is very quickly made irrelevant by the duration of the task itself. For example, Java and C# start up slower than many interpreted languages, but can be significantly faster once they get going. I suggest a more accurate benchmark to be something that include some file io, string processing, arithmetic, and some basic data structure operations. I have an idea I might code up later.