[Python-Dev] More optimisation ideas (original) (raw)

Steven D'Aprano steve at pearwood.info
Fri Feb 5 00:05:45 EST 2016

On Thu, Feb 04, 2016 at 07:58:30PM -0500, Terry Reedy wrote:

>>For folks that do know how to use the terminal: >> >>$ python3 -m inspect --details inspect >>Target: inspect >>Origin: /usr/lib64/python3.4/inspect.py >>Cached: /usr/lib64/python3.4/pycache/inspect.cpython-34.pyc >>Loader: <frozenimportlib.SourceFileLoader object at 0x7f0d8d23d9b0> >> >>(And if they just want to read the source code, then leaving out >>"--details" prints the full module source, and would work even if the >>standard library were in a zip archive)

This is completely inadequate as a replacement for loading source into an editor, even if just for reading. [...]

I agree with Terry. The inspect trick Nick describes above is a great feature to have, but it's not a substitute for opening the source in an editor, not even on OSes where the command line tools are more powerful than Windows' default tools.

[...]

I agree that removing stdlib python source files by default is an poor idea. The disk space saved is trivial. So, for me, would be nearly all of the time saving.

I too would be very reluctant to remove the source files from Python by default, but I have an alternative. I don't know if this is a ridiculous idea or not, but now that the .pyc bytecode files are kept in a separate pycache directory, could we freeze that directory and leave the source files available for reading?

(I'm not even sure if this suggestion makes sense, since I'm not really sure what "freezing" the stdlib entails. Is it documented anywhere?)

-- Steve

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