[Python-Dev] Keeping competitive with Go (was Re: Computed Goto dispatch for Python 2) (original) (raw)

Thomas Wouters thomas at python.org
Fri May 29 04:04:52 CEST 2015

On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 6:13 PM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:

Go seems to be popular where I work. It is replacing Python in a number of places, although Python (and especially Python 3) is still a very important part of our language toolbox.

There are several reasons why Go is gaining popularity. Single-file executables is definitely a reason; it makes deployment very easy, even if it increases the maintenance burden (e.g. without shared libraries, you have multiple copies of things so when a security fix is required for one of those things you have to recompile the world). Start up times and memory footprint are also factors. Probably not much to be done about the latter, but perhaps PEP 432 can lead to improvements in the former. (Hey Nick, I'm guessing you'll want to bump that one back to 3.6.) Certainly better support for multi-cores comes up a lot. It should be a SMoE to just get rid of the GIL once and for all . One thing I've seen more than once is that new development happens in Python until the problem is understood, then the code is ported to Go. Python's short path from idea to working code, along with its ability to quickly morph as requirements and understanding changes, its batteries included philosophy, and its "fits-your-brain" consistency are its biggest strengths! On May 28, 2015, at 10:37 AM, Donald Stufft wrote: >I think docker is a pretty crummy answer to Go’s static binaries. What I would >love is for Python to get: > >* The ability to import .so modules via zipzimport (ideally without a >temporary directory, but that might require newer APIs from libc and such). +1 - Thomas Wouters mentioned at the language summit some work being done on glibc to add dlopenfrommemory() (sp?) which would allow for loading .so files directly from a zip. Not sure what the status is of that, but it would be a great addition.

It's dlopen_with_offset: https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=11767. There's also a patch that's sort-of dlopen_from_memory (dlopen_ehdr), but it requires a lot of manual setup to map the right bits to the right places; dlopen_with_offset is a lot simpler.

Building a Python application into a single file doesn't require dlopen_with_offset, iff you build everything from source. It's not easy to do this -- Python's setup.py and third-party's uses of distutils don't allow this -- but it's mostly possible using the old Modules/Setup file. (Or you could do what we routinely do at Google with third-party packages and re-implement the build in your own build system ;P)

>* The ability to create a “static” Python that links everything it needs into >the binary to do a zipimport of everything else (including the stdlib). This is possible (with some jumping through hoops) using Modules/Setup and some post-processing of the standard library. It would be a lot easier if we got rid of distutils for building Python (or for everything) -- or made it output a Modules/Setup-like file :) (For those who don't remember, Modules/Setup was the file we used to build stdlib extension modules before we had distutils, and it's parsed and incorporated into the regular Makefile. It can build both static and dynamic extension modules.)

+1

>*The ability to execute a zipfile that has been concat onto the end of the >Python binary.

This is already possible, just not with the regular 'python' binary. All it takes is fifty lines of C or so, a tiny application that embeds Python, sets sys.path[0] to argv[0], and uses the runpy module to execute something from the ZIP file. There are some issues with this approach (like what sys.executable should be :) but they're mostly cosmetic

+1 >I think that if we get all of that, we could easily create a single file >executable with real, native support from Python by simply compiling Python >in that static mode and then appending a zip file containing the standard >library and any other distributions we need to the end of it. > >We’d probably want some more quality of life improvements around accessing >resources from within that zip file as well, but that can be done as a >library easier than the above three things can. E.g. you really should be using the pkgresources APIs for loading resources from your packages, otherwise you're gonna have problems with zip executables. We've talked before about adopting some of these APIs into Python's stdlib. pkgutil is a start, and the higher level APIs from pkgresources should probably go there. Cheers, -Barry

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