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Comment by nunez | Hacker News Reader

The start time is a major disadvantage behind Powershell. It takes 3 seconds to load even if you disable profiles completely versus <1 second for Python, Ruby or Bash.

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Process creation on Windows has always been significantly slower than Unix. That is why PowerShell is skewed towards "built-ins" vs launched applications. The ramification of that is slower startup times.

Interesting note - it is also the reason why PowerShell was able to adopt the more natural Verb-Noun model for cmd naming. In Unix, this would produce a huge # of files OR and you couldn't do "VERB NOUN" because then you would have to multiplex on the VERB. Unix's "NOUN VERB" is the result.

BTW - VMS DCL stepped on all these rakes which is why it is have VERB/NOUN and half NOUN/VERB. A complete mess.

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]

Would you consider a powershell server process to speed up startup?

This is an idea we've discussed, but not something we're investing in right now. It could also solve the sudo/elevation problem for cmdlets. However a privileged service would also bring more security concerns.

Hey Steve you're doing a great job with PS! Thank you for all the hard work you and your guys are doing. You are also exceptionally responsive on GitHub.

Yeah, it makes it useless for short scripts. But I think a lot of that’s the .NET runtime start-up time. So getting rid of it might be challenging.

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