About the myth of slow starting
Written by jjgarcia on 2010-06
I am tired of reading complaints about how slow ECL is at being launched. Things are constantly improving but the current boot times are reasonable enough. A stupid way to test them is to do something like "ecl -norc -eval '(quit)'" or the equivalent for SBCL and CLISP.
Here are the findings
Ubuntu/x64 ECL: 0.060 s (git/CVS) SBCL: 0.038 s (1.0.29.11) CLISP: 0.021 s (v. 2.44.1)
Notice that the whole difference arises because ECL has to reconstruct the data that forms the program (constants, functions, etc) reading them from a text representation. Is it really that large a difference?
