Slow startup time

[epitron]

This isn't a show-stopping problem, but gitless' startup time is pretty sluggish. (eg: running gl --help on my laptop takes a full second, and generates 5300 lines of strace output, which includes about 180 python files, and it even loads the system's SSL CA store.)

One thing I love about git is how quick it is; when you press enter, the program should give you some kind of output immediately (< 200ms), even if that output is "Working...".

Here's some info on how bzr managed to decrease its startup time with a lot of little tricks, such as lazily loading modules: https://files.bemusement.org/talks/OSDC2008-FastPython/

[cellarweasel]

Hey Epitron, I found this while wondering why my gl on mac (downloaded from teh website) takes >10 seconds for every single command. Including just the gl status or 'gl' by it self.
On my Ubuntu VM, on that same mac (one core btw) gl takes 100 or so milliseconds according to the time command. This is 2 orders of magnitude difference! And it demonstrates that it isn't inherent to gl just the way it is packaged!
gl is essentially not worth using on my mac because I have to stare at the screen every time I do anything. But on ubuntu it's totally normal, nothing seems slow. I mean it is technically 10x slower than git, but I don't care about that below 200 milliseconds.
Because I actually do compilation and DevOps at work I just want to say that if this really is holding gitless back it's a solvable problem just from how it's packaged. Nothing (nothing!) in the code has to change.