Emacs is big, startup is slow and you have to carry a pile of elisp scripts which fulfil your feature needs. All features has to be written in elisp of course that could be an issue too. Just a matter of taste.
Please. I don't even bother compiling my .el to .elc and I've got a shitload of modes and a gigantic .emacs file (which I should split btw).
Emacs, from the scratch, takes two seconds to fully load, including all the modes and my solarized color theme etc. I'm not talking about always running an Emacs server to which you can connect in a split second: no, I'm talking about a cold start.
It's 2013 and that's on a Core i5 3450s with 4 GB of RAM. Hardly a speed/memory demon.
If I was motivated I'd compile all my .el to .elc and always run emacs in server/daemon mode to connect lightweight windows to it but why bother!? The friggin' entire thing launches in two seconds!
Regarding the "Emacs is big", I know the joke was funny when people, 20 years ago, were writing that Emacs meant "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping" but in this day and age where most devs are using IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse or other super-fat IDEs, you have to admit that Emacs is really in the "very very very lightweight camp".
Yes, you need lot of elisp scripts: and preferrably as much as possible written by yourself, because this means you're tailoring your editor to your needs, not the other way around.
Two seconds? Is this a joke? My browser starts faster than that. Often it takes me less than two seconds to open a file, make a minor edit, save it, exit, and recompile.
