Slow startup

[dasmithii]

The upstart time for Kit is too slow. This isn't a bug, but it would be nice to speed things up a bit.

I think the primary cause is an overabundance of import statements. The code is organized in such a way that requires many imports in each module, which, according to this link, may increase startup overhead. Some refactoring might help. Lazy imports are another option (can they be made automatic in any way?).

Other potential areas of improvement:

• the scanner and its recursive globbing of source files
• makefiles in the context of parallel compilation (this might not help during startup, but it'll speed things up nevertheless)