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Comment by jonny383 | Hacker News Reader

When I hear "curl alternative", I think of something low-level, portable and frankly, something that will compile _almost_ anywhere that has a C compiler.

But then I realized I'm thinking of libcurl, not curl. So maybe this isn't so bad in Python as a client tool. Does Python 3 still start up really slow though? (honest question)

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No, Python has never (last decade) had a startup time that is noticeable by humans when running CLI scripts, unless your CLI script is importing a large codebase. JVM languages are an example of languages which do start up too slowly to be attractive for CLI scripting. You are right that python can be horribly slow to import a large codebase, for example when starting a web server in a large django project.

AOT compilation has come back to JVM languages both on HotSpot and Graal. There are now lots of ways to remove JVM startup time penalties and most of them provide for startup times that are as fast as Python independent of code size.

Does this apply to scala?

Scala Native [0] gives you AOT via LLVM, so it isn't quite the same thing, but can, in some circumstances, significantly speed up your code.

[0] https://github.com/scala-native/scala-native

Right, that makes sense. I did just test a couple of short Python programs

  $ time python3 test.py 
  Hello world

  real    0m0.020s
  user    0m0.020s
  sys     0m0.000s

FWIW we had to move away from python in the project I was working on because just waiting for the help took more than 15 seconds (IIRC) on a beaglebone black.

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