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I can't help but think if a one-time initialisation cost is bogging a process down, there are bigger problems than that initialisation cost.

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There are processes that you might need to run frequently. I gave an example above: showing the output of a Python script on your shell prompt (e.g. mercurial status).

I moved from Python to Go for rendering my shell prompt for much the same reason: https://blog.bethselamin.de/posts/latency-matters.html

Funnily I did exactly the same -- rewrote parts of a powerline (shell prompt status enhancements) implementation that I used and was written in Python, and turned it into Go.

But it still has to call into Python to get my mercurial status (we use mercurial at work so I need to have that).

If you're running hundreds of very small tests, that one time initialization could take up a large portion of time.

So...maybe...consolidate the process of executing hundreds of little things?

How tiny do the steps in this thought process need to be? We can go on all night.

It's cleanest if each test runs in a new execution context, so that tests can't effect one another.

That's a naive solution to a tiny problem.

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