It's been almost 30 years since I last touched Pascal, and I admin, I had entirely dismissed the language as a viable tool from my tool-chest.
But today, I stumbled upon this analysis of startup times for various programming languages:
https://github.com/bdrung/startup-timeLo and behold, for this metric, FCP outperforms everything it was pitted against, being 3.5x as fast as the next runner-up, C, 5x-6x as fast as the cool kids on the block, Go and Rust, and 9x as fast as Bash, which should be a reasonable base-line for process startup times (seeing that it's sole purpose is to glue other processes together). FCP outperforms Python by an absurd 100x, and Java by perhaps 700x.
While I haven't run these benchmarks myself, I am assuming that they are likely in the correct ballpark, unless there was a serious flaw in the experiment. For example if FCP crashed quickly during startup, this went unnoticed, and the crash time was reported as a success time.
This kind of performance is hardly an accident. So I'm really curious to know, what's the secret sauce that makes FCP outperform the rest of the flock?