How much does start-up time matter when choosing a framework?

I got nerd-sniped.

I was asked about measuring and possibly benchmarking different .NET frameworks for making native apps in terms of performance.

Apparently, this is an important factor for some people when choosing a framework.

I think I know better. I know you can write very bad (hence slow) code in any language or with any framework. I also know there are almost infinite things you can do to make code faster.

A basic comparison didn't seem very useful. I knew that if I saw such a thing, I wouldn't care very much, as it all comes down to optimising appropriately in a real app, given the constraints and requirements of/for that particular app.

I tried to find a way to get excited about the prospect, but couldn't see what could be exciting.

However, two questions persisted:

1. Do other people care?
2. How much difference is there?

It's hard to know if other people care, but is there a significant difference?

Time for a quick experiment...

Doing the simplest and quickest thing I could, I did a quick test to see how long it takes to launch a trivially simple app and for it to report that it has finished loading.

Here are the initial results:

The Windows Forms perf was to be expected and was included as a reference for the others.

Why is there so much difference?

Is this interesting?

Do you care?

Should I go deeper in investigating more realistic scenarios and considering simple optimizations (like AOT)?

Let me know if you want to know more.