> If a feature is going to cost start-up time, I would rather not have it. Is it that we don't care about start-up time? Or is it that we don't have the choice?

> If a feature is going to cost start-up time, I would rather not have it. Is it that we don't care about start-up time? Or is it that we don't have the choice? We still care about start-up time, but there's diminishing returns to this sort of optimization. Moreover, the developer teams have to balance these factors with a variety of other product features and with optimizations for developer productivity. Gains in hardware performance might be wasted by slow software, but "fast software" can certainly reap the benefits. By "fast software", I mean computation heavy workloads like ML training, image processing, etc. The article touches on this. > But doing the same thing should never become slower. Starting up an application should never take longer than it used to. I would not consider starting up Xcode in 2008 and starting up Xcode in 2020 to be "doing the same thing". Through many years of updates, this application has become very different. I personally don't use Xcode, but I would hope that Xcode 2020 has more features than Xcode 2008. Now, whether Xcode 2020 actually NEEDS all those new features is a different questions, especially if it comes at a cost to start-up time. As individual users, it may feel like we have no choice in these decisions. However, the optimist in me wants to think that we DO have a choice. We can still "vote with our behavior". If Xcode is too slow, users will stop using it and prefer alternatives that provide the performance that we want. However, if users continue to use Xcode in spite of slow start-up time, then perhaps there's something more important that's keeping users around.