[lizmat]

> those numbers show that Perl and Tcl, both "full featured" scripting languages, don't have the least issue on the matter.

Anybody using modern Perl will most likely also use Moose, and probably big integers as well. If you compare startup times with Perl / Moose / big integers with Rakudo (on the same Intel hardware as before):

% time perl -MMoose -Mbigint -e '' real 0.20s user 0.14s sys 0.02s

% time rakudo -e '' real 0.16s user 0.15s sys 0.04s

And suddenly, Raku starts up faster than Perl! Because Raku comes with a Moose like object system and big integers out of the box, it doesn't need to do anything special to give you those features.

So in a way, you're comparing apples with oranges when you're just comparing bare startup times. Because you are not considering the feature set you get with a bare startup.

So your remark was definitely NOT very nice.