Because, there wasn't anything to import?! preg_match(), getopt(), system(), etc. are already available... if anything, you should be asking why I'm unfairly penalizing PHP by comparing it against a no-import Python!

And I did give you an example of Python that doesn't import anything, and as you can see (and could have easily tested yourself) it was still a lot slower...

Python not importing anything is the same speed as php not importing anything on my system. Oh, and--incidentally, javascript is 20% faster than php and python both, and afaik you don't have to import libraries there either.

Yes, so that means Python is slower to start on your system too. Not sure what you mean by "Javascript"... what program are you running?

Javascriptcore; jsc. It's part of webkit (comes from the webkit2gtk package on my system).

Oh I see. Cool.

Now compare with Lua:

  $ python3 -c "import sys, timeit; n = 10; print('%.2f ms/spawn' % (1000 * timeit.timeit('subprocess.call([%r, %r], stdin=subprocess.DEVNULL, stdout=subprocess.DEVNULL)' % ('lua', '-'), 'import subprocess', number=n) / n))"
  1.09 ms/spawn

NewLisp:

  $ python3 -c "import sys, timeit; n = 10; print('%.2f ms/spawn' % (1000 * timeit.timeit('subprocess.call([%r, %r], stdin=subprocess.DEVNULL, stdout=subprocess.DEVNULL)' % ('newlisp', '-'), 'import subprocess', number=n) / n))"
  1.25 ms/spawn