[vsmenon]

[disclaimer: I work on the Dart team.]

As others have already noted, the intent here is to purely measure the one-time startup cost of the runtime in ahead-of-time compiled code - i.e., the amount of time necessary before we can starting executing any user code - i.e., the print in this case. It's assumed that the time to do the actual print is trivial here.

If you want to compare, you might compare with other garbage collected language/runtimes.

[dmitriid]

The text on the page is "AOT-compile apps to native machine code for instant startup".

And now you're saying that the start up is actually not instant.

- LuaJIT: 0.002ms [1]

- Dash and perl take about 2ms. Python takes 12. [2]

- Perl 0.008s [3]

- Python 0.009s [4]

And that's before we talk about compilation speeds [5]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23109404

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23110092

[3] https://twitter.com/beeonbird/status/1258472898446180353

[4] https://twitter.com/f00zz_/status/1258427236891480067

[5] https://twitter.com/alexyanov/status/1258474918607544322

[vsmenon]

"Instant" is a relative word (unless we're actually at 0 time :-)).

We're focus on client apps, where we're really focused on human perception. In that sense, I'd consider 22ms or 2ms as instant (for startup). I wouldn't consider 2s as instant.

I'm not saying Dart doesn't have room to get better, but there are diminishing returns at a certain point.