I'm running Babel 6.24.1 on a Retina MacBook Pro, with a 2.9 GHz Intel Core i5 processor and 16 GB of RAM.

It takes 380ms to print the version string:

$ time ./node_modules/.bin/babel --version
6.24.1 (babel-core 6.24.1)
./node_modules/.bin/babel --version  0.34s user 0.05s system 102% cpu 0.381 total

"Print the version string" is probably the simplest thing you can ask Babel to do and serves as a good proxy for start up cost. This seems a little excessive. Roughly, this is the same amount of time it takes to bounce a packet from us-east-1 to Turkmenistan and back.

Node takes about 13ms.

$ time node --version
v7.9.0
node --version  0.00s user 0.00s system 45% cpu 0.013 total

I'm wondering what steps could be taken to optimize the start up time as Babel is usually not a long-running application.