Well it really depends on what operations you expect to be instant. Basic editing like movement, inserting, etc is instant, but summing from 1 to 100000000000000000000000 is where elisp would show its poor performance.

People talk about its slowness, but I've got mine pretty damn kitted out and it's still faster than VSCode, VStudio, and JetBrains products. It's not as fast as vim, I'll admit, though.

Recent releases have greatly improved performance.

That is, unless you're talking about launching emacs each time you want to edit a single file, then emacs won't load instantly like vi will.

I'm an emacs fan but there's no excuse. It's insane that an editor from the 1970's is perceptibly laggy on the latest Macbook Pro.

This is a good article about the problem https://discourse.doomemacs.org/t/why-is-emacs-doom-slow/83/...

This is basically why I don't use intellij.

Work pays for everything, I just dont want to wait 10 minutes for an environment to change.

Use a vanilla config (i.e. no config), and it's pretty fast.