A lot of the startup cost right now is in our really ancient update checker. There are plans to rewrite all of this, now that we understand why it's bad, and have some solid ideas as to what we can do better.

I do think it's reasonable to get the startup time of Discord to be near what VS Code's startup times are. If we remove the updater, it actually starts pretty fast (chromium boot -> JS loaded from cache) is <1s on a modern PC. And there's so much more we can do from there, for example, loading smaller chunks in the critical "load and get to your messages path" - being able to use v8 heap snapshots to speed up starting the app, etc...

The slow startup time is very much an us problem, and not an electron problem and is something I hope we'll be able to address this year.