VS17 has an option to "quick load" projects. It loads up in a jiffy (unlike it's previous versions), but you cannot use some of the IDE features.

I seriously hope they add a lazy load feature in the future.

There's a feature called Lightweight Solution Load [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/extensibility/...] which does seem to just lazily load projects.

But even with that turned off, opening large solutions is vastly faster than in VS2015.

Isn't quick load just a rename of lazy load, based on your description?

Nope, apparently quick load doesn't load several IDE features at all. What I mean by lazy load is that it should incrementally load the IDE features after the IDE starts.

Jeez, the obvious optimization would have been to load some of the features first and then load the rest, but to not load them at all? That's not very useful.

Well, as a back-seat commenter I agree with you but they probably had a good reason to not do it. Most likely something to do with development complexity. There's a ton of smart people working on Visual Studio, I'm willing to trust their judgment on this :)

Well, they definitely had good reason, it's just that the feature isn't very useful without the extra work. Although, I don't know exactly how much functionality is missing, so I might be wrong.

Well, it might just be laying the groundwork for lazy loading. They probably thought some people might find it useful even as a "half feature".

Yeah, that seems like the most reasonable explanation. It sounds like the answer was just "deadline".