RArandomtoast·Dec 11, 2025
I'm referring to the startup time as benchmarked in the following manner: https://github.com/bdrung/startup-time
In Python Workers redux: fast cold starts, packages, and a uv-first workflowbdrung
startup-time
Makefile2018–2025
bdrung / startup-time
startup-time
Measure startup time of different programming languages
6Distinct people
7Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
156GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Measure startup time of different programming languages
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year7 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2018-10-23 06:12:03 UTC to 2025-12-11 13:54:33 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
7 sourcesHere is a benchmark https://github.com/bdrung/startup-time
This benchmark is a little bit outdated but the problem remains the same.
Interpreter initialization: Python builds and initializes its entire virtual machine and built-in object structures at startup. Native programs already have their machine code ready and need very little runtime scaffolding.
Dynamic import system: Python’s module import machinery dynamically locates, loads, parses, compiles, and executes modules at runtime. A compiled binary has already linked its dependencies.
Heavy standard library usage: Many Python programs import large parts of the standard library or third-party packages at startup, each of which runs top-level initialization code.
This is especially noticeable if you do not run on an M1 Ultra, but on some slower hardware. From the results on Rasperberr
Read the rest
y PI 3:
C: 2.19 ms
Go: 4.10 ms
Python3: 197.79 ms
This is about 200ms startup latency for a print("Hello World!") in Python3.
Ask HN: Anyone know why Free Pascal's startup is so fast?
I came across this benchmark https://github.com/bdrung/startup-time and I was absolutely blown away by how fast Free Pascal's startup is. Between that and the numbers FP put up in memory usage in https://thenewstack.io/which-programming-languages-use-the-least-electricity/ I'm curious to give the language a go
3 points · Open discussionMeasure startup time of different programming languages
2 points · Open discussionDifferent tools are better at different things.
Shell is required to be basically everywhere. It's part of POSIX. It's also standardized. Shell scripts written 30 years ago still work, and will probably work 30 years from now too. Shell is probably on your TV.
Not everyone has Python. The most common version in the field is Python2, but that's officially obsolete. Python3 is in many places, but not everywhere. The two Pythons are basically incompatible unless you're willing to put in an effort. You have to work to make Python scripts compatible with both versions, especially if you can only use built-ins, and the results are way clunkier than that 2-line shell script you're trying to replace.
Python is a terrible choice if your goal is a relatively short script that calls other programs. You can call out to other programs in Python, but i
Read the rest
t's much clunkier and more painful to maintain. And while it often doesn't matter (because neither are speedy), CPython 3 takes more than 50x more time to start than dash and 27x time to start than bash (see: https://github.com/bdrung/startup-time , which shows
Python3 3.6.4 at 197.79 ms, Bash 4.4.12 at 7.31 ms, and dash 0.5.8 at 2.81 ms). That speed is helpful when you want to have a "simple script in a loop".
Python is much better than shell when you start needing more sophisticated data types, libraries, modularity, etc. But the typical use for a shell script doesn't need any of that. If you need that, shell is a terrible tool, because it's the wrong tool for the job, not because it's never useful.
If you're writing shell, use shellcheck. Once you do that, your error likelihood goes way down. Many of the reports of problems writing shell come from a time when shellcheck didn't exist.
Startup time of different programming languages
3 points · Open discussion> but it's performance is closer to Java, which is a few orders of magnitude slower than C++
A few order of magnitude is an exaggeration. A more reasonable expectation is a 5x slowdown [1]. Depending on your task, a few orders of magnitude can be correct for JVM based languages; they can have very poor startup times (compared to c++) [2]. However, in startup time, go is not similar to Java.
[1]:https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
[2]:https://github.com/bdrung/startup-time
In Rust can be difficult to learn and frustrating, but it's also very exciting