Improve startup speed/performance of CLI

Even with telemetry turned off, our CLI seems a bit slow sometimes:

C:\Users\Jan>cordova -v | gnomon
   1.1532s   8.1.2 (cordova-lib@8.1.1)
   0.0014s

     Total   1.1572s

C:\Users\Jan>node -v | gnomon
   0.0116s   v10.15.1
   0.0010s

     Total   0.0135s

C:\Users\Jan>npm -v | gnomon
   0.6859s   6.4.1
   0.0016s

     Total   0.6893s

C:\Users\Jan>ngrok -v | gnomon
   0.0131s   ngrok version 2.2.8
   0.0017s

     Total   0.0157s

(Yes, I am working on a not very powerful machine here) (ionic is even slower with >7 seconds - but that’s no excuse 😉 )

[janpio]

Renamed to a task that benefits of both the measurements and your analysis.

[raphinesse]

I did some profiling and about half of the time is spent by require('insight'). When you drill down a bit, you can see that the actual culprit that causes the long loading time is Rx.js which is required by inquirer, a dependency of insight.

Roughly the other half is spent on loading cordova-lib. There’s a few things I wanted to do about that for some time, but I haven’t gotten to it. The Problem with improving the loading time there is that a lot of modules require way more than they would have to. I have some WIP to improve that, but it’s quite some work since test doubles are affected when changing requires etc.

My times for cordova -v are as follows:

• cordova@latest: 1050 ms
• Without loading insight: 700ms
• Without loading insight and cordova-lib: 190ms
• Running an empty bin/cordova: 100ms