The Julia REPL starts in less than a second, importing the Plots module takes a couple of seconds, and the first plot appears in a few more seconds (on my weak computer). If you keep the REPL open, subsequent plots are quite speedy. This may indeed not be snappy enough for some workflows that involve starting a fresh Julia process for each iteration—in which case, it’s pretty simple to create a sysimage with the plotting functions and anything else you use routinely precompiled in: https://www.matecdev.com/posts/julia-package-compiler.html