On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 16:13, Greg Ewing <greg.ew...@canterbury.ac.nz>wrote:
> Michael Foord wrote: > > I thought we agreed at the language summit that if a .pyc was in the place >> of the source file it *could* be imported from - making pyc only >> distributions possible. >> > > Ah, that's okay, then. Sorry about the panic! > > Michael is right about what as discussed at the language summit, but Barry means what he says; if you look at the PEP as it currently stands it does not support bytecode-only modules. Barry and I discussed how to implement the PEP at PyCon after the summit and supporting bytecode-only modules quickly began to muck with the semantics and made it harder to explain (i.e. what to set __file__ vs. __compiled__ based on what is or is not available and how to properly define get_paths for loaders). But a benefit of no longer supporting bytecode-only modules by default is it cuts back on possible stat calls which slows down Python's startup time (a complaint I hear a lot). Performance issues become even more acute if you try to come up with even a remotely proper way to have backwards-compatible support in importlib for its ABCs w/o forcing caching on all implementors of the ABCs. As for having a dependency on a loader, I don't see how that is obscure; it's just a dependency your package has that you handle at install-time. And personally, I don't see what bytecode-only modules buy you. The obfuscation argument is bunk as we all know. Bytecode contains so much data that disassembling it gives you a very clear picture of what the original code was like. I think it's almost a dis-service to support bytecode-only files as it leads people who are misinformed or simply don't take the time to understand what is contained in a .pyc file into a false sense of security about their code not being easy to examine by someone else. The only perk I can see is space-saving, but that's dangerous as that ties you to a specific VM with a specific magic number (let alone that it leads to people tying themselves to CPython and ignoring the other VMs that simply do not support bytecode). -Brett > -- > Greg > > _______________________________________________ > Python-Dev mailing list > Python-Dev@python.org > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev > Unsubscribe: > http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/brett%40python.org >
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