Slow start up time of runtime

[Dennis]

On Tuesday, 20 March 2018 at 10:20:55 UTC, Dennis wrote:
> On Tuesday, 20 March 2018 at 09:51:09 UTC, bauss wrote:
>> Besides if it was and it took 1 second to startup, then it 
>> wouldn't matter in practice with an actual application.
>
> This is not concerning for large applications indeed. But say, 
> I want to implement my own `dir` (= `ls` on Unix) in D. Would 
> you want to use it if it took a full second every time you 
> wanted to quickly view a folder's contents?

To give some more context, I've been using some of the digital 
mars utilities and I admire their speed. A `grep -r "goto" *.d` 
could find and scan 1.7 MB of d-source files in 190ms, way before 
my D hello-world was even able to enter main. As far I know, 
these are just C programs. I wonder if I could make such fast 
utilities in D, or whether (idiomatic) D is not the right tool 
for this and I should use (better)C instead.