alt Hacker NewsI care because every second of that startup time is lost productivity and focus. For me and any developer on my team. Hot reload only works if no class or method has changed so that's not a solution. I've worked on codebases of similar size and complexity in many languages, and the developer experience of a compile and restart that takes less than five seconds is game changing.
I can imagine a full build of the project(s) in TFA are on the order of several minutes to build/run the first, and maybe every time. I remember working on projects before SSDs were common that would take on the order of a half hour or more... the layers of abstraction were so that you literally had to thread through 15+ projects in two different solutions in order to add a single parameter for a query and it would take a couple weeks to develop and test.
That said, I did catch up on my RSS feeds during that job.