I find it a bit messy to build but I'm not exactly a compile binaries kind of person anymore so it's probably a good sign that I still manage to figure it out. If stuff like Zig is your thing you'll probably enjoy this part.
My main terminal emulator is the bog slow but reliable Terminator, though in a while I'll probably flip the i3 commands and move over entirely to Ghostty.
(I haven't used ghostty so I wouldn't know whether it's actually fast to start up, but what you wrote reminded me about this particular issue.)
So, perhaps? For a while I was on a local compile of 1.0.0, and a while ago I started pulling the nightly sources and build from those.