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I completely agree, but you'll notice similar startup overheads in almost all non-native languages: Java, Ruby, Node.js.

I wonder if there is anything that can really be done, outside of something like Cython.

> I wonder if there is anything that can really be done, outside of something like Cython.

I compile my cli tools with nuitka [0], the resulting binaries take half the time to start. I find the difference quite notable.

The interpreter loads reasonably fast, takes around 20-40ms. And it's even faster if "import site on initialization" is disabled.

But startup time increases an order of magnitude once you start importing 'requests' and other common packages.

Perhaps an option to turn imports lazy...