[aftbit]

The result of running the same on st for me:

    Benchmark 1: st -e true
      Time (mean ± σ):      35.4 ms ±   6.9 ms    [User: 15.1 ms, System: 3.8 ms]
      Range (min … max):    24.2 ms …  65.2 ms    114 runs

This is on awesome-wm with the window opening as the 3rd tiled window on a monitor, which means it has to redraw at least the other two windows. I'm also running xfs on top of luks/dm-crypt for my filesystem, which shouldn't matter too much on this benchmark thanks to the page cache, but is a relatively common source of performance woes on this particular system. I really ought to migrate back to unencrypted ext4 and use my SSD's encryption but I haven't wanted to muck with it.

[BoingBoomTschak]

To get an idea of the cost of tiling (with bspwm, quarter screen tile and 2560x1440@60Hz screen):

  hyperfine -L args '','-c floating' 'st {args} -e true'
  Benchmark 1: st  -e true
    Time (mean ± σ):      25.0 ms ±   2.7 ms    [User: 10.5 ms, System: 3.7 ms]
    Range (min … max):    14.8 ms …  44.1 ms    197 runs

  Benchmark 2: st -c floating -e true
    Time (mean ± σ):      22.7 ms ±   2.6 ms    [User: 10.3 ms, System: 3.9 ms]
    Range (min … max):    20.7 ms …  35.4 ms    123 runs

  Summary
    'st -c floating -e true' ran
      1.10 ± 0.17 times faster than 'st  -e true'

Flexing my system too, heh.