Quote Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker View Post
I was thinking about that, too. My work PC is...nothing special. That's not slagging the company, it is just a coincidence of timing, and will be resolved in time, but it's the fact. I also do a fair amount of development on a virtual server. Not sure what the performance should be for that. It doesn't really matter, since there's a lag in working over the wire, and that makes startup times irrelevant. That lag exists in every application run on that server, so you just learn to type a bit slower. As a comparison, that's not a fair comparison.

However, my home system is pretty doggone good, as it's a recently built gaming system with some pretty good hardware built around an SSD. Startup times on that are pretty awesome.

Which brings up one point: Whatever is currently slow might not be slow in a couple years. Some people complain about the size of programs, but not so much now that you can get a terabyte HD for a few hundred dollars. We used to worry about arrays that exceeded one memory frame. Now....we just don't. Could we write code as compact as that? Yeah, sure, but nobody bothers because we just don't care about 64K limits (or 4K limits, if you wrote for TRS-80 Level 1s).

So, when we compare speeds, it's also kind of important to compare hardware capabilities. Still, I'd say the biggest single slowdown with launching versions of an IDE have to do with....details, whether third party add-ins, features, or bad installations.

I guess I could sum up this post with one word: Whatever.
Microsoft used to be the dominant giant. When Microsoft was closed and conservative, competitors (such as Google) then defeated it through open source and openness. When Microsoft's products are getting bigger and more inefficient, competitors will beat it with smaller, more efficient products.