See my other comment from earlier today[1] – launching 230 external programs (even very simple ones, /bin/[ in this case) takes about half a second. Since I would rate anything as >100ms to be a "noticeable delay" you have a "budget" of about 40 external processes, probably a bit less in real-world conditions (depending on which utilities you're using and what it's doing).
And that's 40 C processes. "python empty.py" takes about 30ms to 40ms due to the interpreter startup time; empty C file is about 2ms, "sh empty.sh" is about 4ms.
Please think that "launching external programs is fast and modern computers are fast, so why worry about this?", and that's true, but it's also not. Add up a few dozen and turns out it's actually quite slow.
And that's 40 C processes. "python empty.py" takes about 30ms to 40ms due to the interpreter startup time; empty C file is about 2ms, "sh empty.sh" is about 4ms.
Please think that "launching external programs is fast and modern computers are fast, so why worry about this?", and that's true, but it's also not. Add up a few dozen and turns out it's actually quite slow.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38421199