On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 2:24 AM, David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > On 21 February 2011 06:20, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: >> There are many (important) potential users who do not use Sage at all >> just because the startup time is so bad. It's really unfortunate >> how much I let the startup time of Sage slip over the years. Sorry. > >> William Stein > > I feel very sorry for anyone that would not use a useful bit of > software because it takes a few seconds longer to start than they > would expect for software. > > If I want to do a few quick calculations, the command I run is: > > $ bc -l > > as the 'bc' calculator starts almost instantly - quicker even than > Mathematica.
But if sage started up as quick as bc, would you be using the (much less featured) bc? I have resorted to using "sage -ipython" when I don't need Sage, which never used to be the case when it was fast. > Perhaps "startup time" should be added to > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_computer_algebra_systems > > though perhaps Wikipedia would consider that "original research". > > Of course it would be nice for Sage not to take too long to start, but > one would have to be pretty sad to reject a piece of software on the > basis of how long it takes to start. Unfortunate but true. The point of the test is that we shouldn't even be close to 1.5 or 2 seconds. Now that the lazy import improvements are finally in (that took a whole year) we should be able to more aggressively attack this, e.g. http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/8254 - Robert -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
