I haven't understood it as benchmark, rather a smell "they did not bother to optimize this?". The computers are so fast today, that instant startup time is low hanging fruit for a language.

But it's an entirely 100% meaningless point of discussion though.

My peers and I use Julia to run numerical heavy code where the large majority of the time is spent inverting a large matrix to solve the equation Ax = b for x. It's a lot more complicated than this, but essentially it can be boiled down to this main equation. When my code takes hours, pushing onto days, to run, why should I care about 300 ms of startup time at all?

I stopped reading the article because their first point (the hello world benchmark) is entirely meaningless and is just noise in the wind. Their second point is a matter of personal opinion. After these two I didn't bother reading the rest.

I think a lot of people that set out to design languages don't start out with the top three design goals as, fast compile times, fast startup, and robust hooks for tooling. The problem is if you don't start out with those as primary design goals you're going to be totally hosed once they become a problem later.

I think the language benchmarks game or the techempower benchmarks are fairly widely known and are a step or two above comparing hello world performance.

Which still don't compare the whole story because they focus on FOSS implementations, and they are not necessarily the best ones available.

Like any ordinary comparison, they are silent about items not included in the comparison.

Please share your comparison of every programming language implementation.