Your computer is broken. My M1 Pro launches it to user interactive in less than two seconds. And, to be clear, I launched it in a profiler. I suggest you do the same on your machine and find out why it's taking that long.

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tom_ 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe it's phoning home to verify the app, or whatever it is it does? Launch times for MS Word on my 11 year old Macbook Pro, approx time to the opening dialog:

First run since last reboot: 19 seconds

Second run: 2.5 seconds

Third run after sudo purge: 7 seconds

Maybe it's an artefact of where I live, but the verify step always takes ages. First run of anything after a reboot takes an outlandish amount of time. GUI stuff is bad; Unix-type subprocess-heavy stuff is even worse. Judging by watching the Xcode debugger try to attach to my own programs, when they are in this state, this is not obviously something the program itself is doing.

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godelski 3 days ago | parent [-]

I think you're right. I rarely use word and so it was definitely running "cold"

I went ahead and did another run and it was much faster. About 2 seconds. So things are definitely being cached. I did a trace on it (Instruments) and there's a lot of network activity. Double the time after sudo purge. There's 2 second of network time where the previous run only spent 1 second. Ran a tad faster when I turned the network off, though ended up using more CPU power.

FWIW, looks to be only using 4 of my 8 cores, all of which are performance cores. Also looks like it is fairly serialized as there's not high activation on any 2 cores at the same time. Like I'll see one core spike, drop, and then another core spike. If I'm reading the profiler right then those are belonging to the same subprocesses and just handing over to a different thread.

For comparison, I also ran on ghostty and then opened vim. Ghostty uses the performance cores but very low demand. vim calls the efficiency cores and I don't see anything hit above 25% and anytime there's a "spike" there's 2, appearing across 2 cores. Not to mention that ghostty is 53MB and nvim is more than a magnitude less. Compared to Word's 2.5GB...

I stand by my original statement. It's a fucking text editor and it should be nearly instantaneous. As in <1s cold start.

	▲	saagarjha 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think even 1s is generous, of course. I'm just saying it doesn't actually take 10.

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tengwar2 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Are we talking about Word, or a text editor? They seem to be saying the latter, particularly given the comparison with vi. I consistently get about half a second to open TextEdit on an M1, and that seems to be due to the opening animation.