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> On my old Ryzen 3600X running Arch

> vim still is a lot faster though.

you might want to make sure you're comparing apples to apples though. the "emacs" command most likely is going to load the GUI emacs so a lot of gui libraries (if you're running a recent emacs then even GTK libraries) whereas the nvim command isn't going to load gui libraries at all.

maybe try with a non-gui version of emacs (or maybe calling emacs -nw)

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no, this is the TUI version. X11 emacs with all the composited effects needs about 200-250ms to open (about the duration of the animation for opening and closing it). That's more like OP's timings.
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No, you need to use -nw with emacs to make it apples to apples. Then it's emacs 0m0.095s vs nvim 0m0.057s:

    $ time nvim -es --cmd 'vim.cmd("q")'

    real 0m0.057s
    user 0m0.016s
    sys 0m0.017s

    $ time emacs -Q -e kill-emacs

    real 0m0.230s
    user 0m0.165s
    sys 0m0.064s

    $ time emacs -nw -Q -e kill-emacs

    real 0m0.095s
    user 0m0.057s
     sys 0m0.017s
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Shouldn't matter when I am not on GUI seat. In my SSH session with X11 forwarding there is no DISPLAY emacs could use.

Tried it anyways, looks the same:

  $ time emacs -nw -Q -e kill-emacs
  real    0m0.075s
  user    0m0.062s
  sys     0m0.013s
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s/with/without/
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