Comment by WJW

The time reported by the "gladvent" package when running with the "--timed" option. AFAICT that does not count compilation (if needed), VM startup time, any JITting happening, or reading in the text file. I'm fine with that tbh, I'm more interested in the time actually spent solving the problem. For other languages I wouldn't count language-specific time like compilation time either.

As to whether you can make startup time faster, I suppose you could keep a BEAM running at all times and have your CLI tools hotswap in some code, run it, and get the results back out or something. That way you can skip VM startup time. Since the BEAM is targeted more at very long-running (server) processes with heaps and heaps of concurrency, I don't think ultrafast startup time is really a focus of it.