It seems as if everybody having even a passing acquaintance with Emacs is opining about Emacs load times. That includes Irreal, of course. Most of us take the position that it doesn’t really matter how long it takes Emacs to start because it’s something that happens only rarely.
Every serious person acknowledges that there are exceptions. A (very) few people have to restart Emacs often for various reasons but for the most part the majority of us have no reason to care. Of course, that doesn’t stop some people from caring. And caring a lot.
Over at the Programming subreddit, dormunis1 is proudly announcing that he’s gotten his Zsh load time to under 70 ms. This is down from the apparently normal load time of 0.45 seconds. If you don’t see the problem with this, you should seek help. These times are all below human reaction times so reducing them, while an interesting intellectual challenge, serves no real purpose.
As usual, a lot of the meat is in the comments. Most of the commenters aren’t sympathetic and agree that it’s an optimization without a point. To be sure, learning to do this sort of thing is useful for cases where it does matter. My objection—and that of the other commenters, apparently—is that reducing the load time of Zsh, Emacs, or any other user facing app, by a few milliseconds simply doesn’t matter.