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500-600ms is, to be fair, a big one time cost.

The downsides are pretty darn significant though. I can’t imagine a situation where I would trade ‘starts a bit faster’ for ‘throw away all parallelism in code’ personally... but hey. Plenty of people use node for very serious stuff.

I suppose I just think this is an example of fast and cheap on the fast/cheap/good scale.

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But this is a shell. You start _all the time_, including plenty of times where you don't really notice: other processes often start subprocesses via your shell to get your environment right. Meanwhile, the shell is usually just waiting for you, so it's not like it's an intrinsically parallel process. This doesn't impact the shell's ability to run multiple things at once: the shell eventually creates subprocesses. One would expect an event-loop like Node to be perfect for this sort of thing.

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