Yeppers. The days of waiting a minute or more for emacs to initialize itself are...

Yeppers. The days of waiting a minute or more for emacs to initialize itself are long gone for most. Still marginally slower than nvim or vim for me (on a 2016 vintage i7-6700k on Linux under X11 inside of a sucksless `st` terminal):

    $ tim 'vim --clean -c quit' 'nvim --clean -c quit' 'emacs -nw -Q -eval "(kill-emacs)"'

    (3.45 +- 0.27)e-04      (AlreadySubtracted)Overhead
    (7.929 +- 0.052)e-03    vim --clean -c quit
    (8.329 +- 0.031)e-03    nvim --clean -c quit
    0.05302 +- 0.00023      emacs -nw -Q -eval "(kill-emacs)"

There can still be a human-noticeable difference when you fire up emacs on some 2.5 MiB org-mode "active document" and it takes over 1000 milliseconds (a whole heartbeat! omg! /scarcasm) while vim still takes under 20 ms. And, similarly, vim/nvim with a lot of plugins loading can push up their start-up times as well.

EDIT: BTW, chances are good that the 4X reduction from 320ms to 80ms over 5 years you are seeing is in large part due to ahead-of-time native compilation of elisp (https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Na... ) and libgccjit/etc. not just CPU/DRAM improvement.