How big really? Can't be more then 200MB? Should be less then minute to download and install? If you have docker, can you go that route?
Also, if you account the fact that you have variants of many other popular tools included OTB is that really a downside ?
That is certainly different concern, you want fast and practical script programming and why would you care if it has first time latency of couple of minutes if you are set good forever after that ?
The shell was running from tmpfs (so basically a RAM disk). I have a decent processor and an NVMe SSD, and this is what I see (it was tested 10 times in a row to pull everything into the page cache properly, and the numbers are pretty stable):
$ time ./pwsh <<<"" >/dev/null
real 0m1.050s
user 0m1.464s
sys 0m0.067s
It's even slower on an older Windows laptop which I have lying around (starts in about 3-4 seconds). Absolutely terrible for an interactive shell/script execution engine.
Just for comparison's sake, the same laptop can run an empty bash script in 2-3 milliseconds. This is very important when running build jobs, for example.
> Measure-Command { pwsh -NoProfile -NoLogo exit }
Days : 0
Hours : 0
Minutes : 0
Seconds : 0
Milliseconds : 254
$ time ./pwsh -NoProfile -NoLogo <<<'' >/dev/null
real 0m0.456s
user 0m0.388s
sys 0m0.040s
There's no defender (or anything similar) on that other machine. It also has an SSD. With an older HDD powershell started in about 10-15 seconds there (while cold startup time for bash was something like a second, and instantly afterwards).