raku kinda puts a bunch of parts of itself together during startup, not entirely unlike Julia.
The sheer dynamism of the thing makes pre-baking that non-trivial, also not entirely unlike Julia.
I seem to recall chatting with the devs on IRC a few years and there seeming to be more than one viable way to potentially fix it, but they all seemed to me to share the property of needing a lot of effort during which nothing would work at all before you got something to show for it - and a decent chance of what you got to show after all that time was "welp, here's why which one can't work" - which is a really heavy lift in terms of somebody finding motivation to try it in the first place.
So tl;dr "yes, I dislike the startup cost, no, I don't expect it to change soon and I don't think it's a black mark against the team that it probably won't."
The sheer dynamism of the thing makes pre-baking that non-trivial, also not entirely unlike Julia.
I seem to recall chatting with the devs on IRC a few years and there seeming to be more than one viable way to potentially fix it, but they all seemed to me to share the property of needing a lot of effort during which nothing would work at all before you got something to show for it - and a decent chance of what you got to show after all that time was "welp, here's why which one can't work" - which is a really heavy lift in terms of somebody finding motivation to try it in the first place.
So tl;dr "yes, I dislike the startup cost, no, I don't expect it to change soon and I don't think it's a black mark against the team that it probably won't."