[necovek]

What I found is that Python is not that terrible (interpreter starts in 60ms on my laptop and imports an empty local file: `touch empty.py; time python3 -c 'import empty'`).

However, idiomatic Python shortcuts to expose everything at the top level (star imports or imports of everything in the top-level __init__.py) cause everything to be imported everywhere. __all__ is all but forgotten, so importing things like flask, sqlalchemy, requests and similar will take anywhere from 100-500ms each, even if you just need a single function from a submodule.

Worst offenders are things which embed their own copy of requests (likely for reproducible builds) taking upwards of 800ms just to import even if your project already imported requests directly.

I don't think it has anything to do with search paths, but simply with loading and executing hundreds of files. If you need those modules, Python will read them. Perhaps moving your venv to a "ramdisk" might help?