[Python-Dev] Python startup time (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Wed May 2 05:43:41 EDT 2018

On Wed, 2 May 2018 11:26:35 +0200 Victor Stinner <vstinner at redhat.com> wrote:

Brett Cannon is also working on a standard solution for lazy imports since many years: https://pypi.org/project/modutil/ https://snarky.ca/lazy-importing-in-python-3-7/

AFAIK, Mercurial already has its own lazy importer.

Nick Coghlan is working on the C API to configure Python startup: PEP 432. When it will be ready, maybe Mercurial could use a custom Python optimized for its use case.

IMHO Python import system is inefficient. We try too many alternative names.

The overhead of importing is not in trying too many names, but in loading the module and executing its bytecode.

Why do we still check for the .pyc file outside pycache directories?

Because we support sourceless distributions.

Why do we have to check for 3 different names for .so files?

See https://bugs.python.org/issue32387

Regards

Antoine.

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