An absolutely ludicrous point, shells have some of the fastest startup times of all processes

If you are mindful and optimize your shell config, yea.

But common stuff like zsh with oh-my-zsh is known to be rather slow, as in several hundred millisec to start.

Depending on you, of course, that might be considered fast. I consider it insanely slow.

My shell of preference, "nushell":

> Startup Time: 24ms 448µs 147ns

Ideally it would launch in < 16ms (1 frame at 60hz), but I can live with this ;-)

Why would you need to optimize the config? I'm not talking about running an interactive shell.

You commented on someone mentioning bash being slow to start.

So your parent discussed interactive shell, and I assumed you did, since you didn't state otherwise.

They were quoting the article, which complains that "shells are too slow to start", with examples of running echo in non-interactive shells.

Nobody is talking about the startup time of interactive shells.

on my crappy old i5 dell laptop running ubuntu 22.04 i see ~1.5ms for bash and ~1ms for sh. i dunno where these really bad numbers are coming from tbh.

They're not claiming bun is faster to start, only that for use cases where you might otherwise need to shell out hundreds of times bun only needs to start once.