> not even the biggest timewaster of python, which is the packaging "system".

For frequent, short-running scripts: start-up time! Every import has to scan a billion different directories for where the module might live, even for standard modules included with the interpreter.

In the near future we will use lazy imports :) https://peps.python.org/pep-0810/

This can't come soon enough. Python is great for CLIs until you build something complex and a simple --help takes seconds. It's not something easily worked around without making your code very ugly.

It's not that hard to handle --help and --version separately before importing anything.

You could, but it doesn't really seem all that useful? I mean, when are you ever going to run this in a hot loop?

> [...] not even the biggest timewaster of python, which is the packaging "system".

The new `uv` is making good progress there.