MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

> a degraded user experience, as the first time a user runs a new executable, Apple delays execution while waiting for a reply from their server.

The way to avoid this behavior is to staple the notarization ticket to your bundle (or dmg/pkg), i.e. "/usr/bin/stapler staple <path>." Otherwise, Gatekeeper will fetch the ticket and staple it for the user on the first run.

(I'm the author of xcnotary [1], a tool to make notarization way less painful, including uploading to Apple/polling for completion/stapling/troubleshooting various code signing issues.)

[1] https://github.com/akeru-inc/xcnotary

I mean, when I’m developing in a compiled language with the workflow edit code -> compile -> run (with forced stapling), changing it to edit code -> compile -> staple -> run doesn’t make it any less slow...

Notarization/stapling/etc. is for distribution only, not generally part of your dev workflow.