About the myth of slow starting

I am tired of reading complaints about how slow ECL is at being launched. Things are constantly improving but the current boot times are reasonable enough. A stupid way to test them is to do something like "ecl -norc -eval '(quit)'" or the equivalent for SBCL and CLISP.

Here are the findings

Ubuntu/x64
ECL: 0.060 s (git/CVS)
SBCL: 0.038 s (1.0.29.11)
CLISP: 0.021 s (v. 2.44.1)

Notice that the whole difference arises because ECL has to reconstruct the data that forms the program (constants, functions, etc) reading them from a text representation. Is it really that large a difference?