> No, every code path you don't execute is that.

Even in compiled languages, binaries have to get loaded into memory. For Python it's much worse. On my machine:

  $ time python -c 'pass'

  real 0m0.019s
  user 0m0.013s
  sys 0m0.006s

  $ time pip --version > /dev/null

  real 0m0.202s
  user 0m0.182s
  sys 0m0.021s

Almost all of that extra time is either the module import process or garbage collection at the end. Even with cached bytecode, the former requires finding and reading from literally hundreds of files, deserializing via `marshal.loads` and then running top-level code, which includes creating objects to represent the functions and classes.

It used to be even worse than this; in recent versions, imports related to Requests are deferred to the first time that an HTTPS request is needed.