Bozhidar Batsov has a post that claims something I’ve often said: Emacs startup time doesn’t matter. No one is saying that your editor taking 30 seconds to start is acceptable but by and large the people you see worrying about startup times are obsessing over sub-second differences. That is, differences that are virtually imperceptible to a human at the keyboard.
Batsov and I say that if you’re using Emacs correctly, you hardly ever restart it. Unlike, say, Vim, you shouldn’t start a new Emacs session for each file you want to edit. When I switched from Vim to Emacs, this was one of the hardest things to get used to. Even if you do want to invoke Emacs for each file, you can simply use Emacsclient and get near instantaneous response.
Judging from the comments on reddit, you’d think Batsov had resurrected Swift’s Modest Proposal. He was accused of being arrogant and not understanding how “real” people use Emacs. If you know anything about Batsov, you’ll find that an amusing notion.
Sure, people do use Emacs in different ways and for different reasons. One commenter, for example, says he develops packages and often has to restart Emacs. John Wiegley does the same but he was a separate Emacs that starts quickly to deal with that: when you’re testing a package you probably want something approaching Emacs -Q anyway.
The TL;DR is that for almost everyone, Emacs startup time really doesn’t matter. I restart Emacs once a week when I upgrade my packages. Batsov says that he goes months without a restart. Even if Emacs did take 30 seconds to start, why would we care. One commenter complains that he has to restart Emacs every morning and, therefore, startup time really does matter. Sorry, but that’s just silly. If you have to spend 5 seconds—or even 30 seconds—starting Emacs in the morning, who cares?
And, by the way, if Emacs really is taking more than a few seconds to start, it probably means that there’s something wrong with your configuration. Mine has plenty of packages, hasn’t been refactored since I started almost 20 years ago, and it still starts within a couple of seconds. It’s hard to get a hard number because it stops to ask me for a password for my .authinfo file. I’m inclined to think of it like booting my machine: it’s not instantaneous but I don’t do it very often.