AFAIK importlib is entirely written in Python and kinda portable across Python implementations, while previously most was C code. It's not surprising something gets slower when written in Python.
> Also, even if you distributed self-contained applications, the startup time is not great. It's improved a bit because you're "statting" a zip file rather than making syscalls, but it's still not great.
PyQt applications on Windows typically take two or more seconds before they can do anything, including Enterprise's favourite start-up pastime, splashscreens. Except maybe if you rolled your own .exe wrapper that displayed the splash before invoking any of the Python loading.
That's really, really poor in the age of 4 GHz CPUs from the factory, RAM big enough to fit multiple copies of all binaries on a PC and SSDs with at the very least tens of thousands of IOPS.
