[azernik]

The performance issue isn't about sysadmins wanting fraction-of-a-second launches; it's about Serious Programmers back in the 90s wanting precious memory. "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping" was the derogatory nickname, back when eight megs was a lot.

(And, secondarily, launch times then were longer; 0.2 seconds vim vs. 2 seconds emacs is a very different comparison than between 2-second vim and 20-second emacs.)

[namibj]

I want my software to be instant, or as close to it as feasible. Vim is fast enough, make sometimes, and gcc not. This is in syntax-only mode for the latter.

[curlypaul924]

But how can you get more instant than "it's already running"? The emacs way of doing things seems to be to do _everything_ in emacs -- it's your shell, your editor, your debugger, your mail client. Vim users, on the other hand, tend to only open vim when they need it.