finally merged and released a big chunk of work that significantly improves Joker's startup time by pre-parsing joker.core code and storing the AST in a binary format:
v0.9.7:
$ time joker -e "1"
real 0m0.168s
user 0m0.226s
sys 0m0.014s
v0.10.0:
$ time joker -e "1"
real 0m0.039s
user 0m0.038s
sys 0m0.010s