Not only Visual Studio s up instantly in an older version of Windows running in a VM. Debugger values update instantly there as well, something that Visual Studio can no longer do.

I really liked Win 2000 because of this feeling of speed. Most programs would simply "open" when you clicked their icon. There wouldn't be a loading screen. I remember getting frustrated because I could not look at the pretty spalsh screen that Excel had added because it would flash and disappear in milliseconds. Amd this was on hardware of that time.

Visual C++ 7 was rewritten to use another SDK, likely based on .Net, and it was noticeably slower. The problem, as I see it, is people don't understand the cost of abstractions and intermediate layers, and add them gratuitously. This has been a trend ever since.

Not really related to launch time but it’s hilarious how much faster Xcode is when working with Objective-C compared to Swift. I understand why, but it’s still jarring

I've never heard of someone describing how long something took like this without at least defining the frame rate.