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Python startup time can be pretty abysmal too if you have a lot of imports.

This is addressed by PEP 810 (explicit lazy imports) in Python 3.15 (currently in alpha): https://peps.python.org/pep-0810/

Yeah, but it requires code changes to matter

So long as you aren't in a docker container, The openjdk can do fast startup pretty trivially.

There are options to turn on which cause the JVM to save off and reload compiled classes. It pretty massively improves performance.

You can get even faster if you do that plus doing a jlink jvm. But that's more of a pain. The AOT cache is a lot simpler to do.

And then you get applications choosing the worst of both worlds, like bazel/blaze.