I love Emacs, and I use it for everything, but it doesn't fit OP's use-case. Emacs startup on Linux is pretty fast these days, but it's painfully slow on Windows. Real Emacs users just never close it, but that's not how this guy wants to work.
My sporadic 1 minute 50 seconds startup time went to less than a second when I forbade Windows Defender to ever scan Emacs' installation folder for viruses.
runemacs.exe starts up almost instantaneously for me on a 5-year-old Dell laptop and Win10. Maybe two seconds from typing em.bat myfile.java to seeing my file presented and ready to edit.
I usually install Emacs on whatever platform I'm given: Windows, Linux, Mac. It's the only editor that I can use consistently across systems. Usually I copy my .emacs file as well, to get all my preferred mappings etc.
Do you use many Emacs packages? My Emacs dashboard on Windows says "120 packages loaded in 22.7 seconds". On a ThinkPad X230 running Linux, the same config starts in around 2 seconds.
I will say that 'runemacs -Q' on a few-years-old Dell desktop does start in about 2 seconds.
Can you not run emacs as a user-level session service on windows like on standard linux, where the startup time cost only occurs once at session logon, and then all future emacs windows are just "clients", and start up near instantly?
Yes, but I inferred from the question that this is not the kind of thing OP wanted to do. That may be a mistaken assumption on my part. It's also not the clearly best path on Windows that it is on Linux. On Windows, for example, 'emacs --daemon' leaves a command window running rather than forking into the background, and a variety of other issues.
