On 08 Aug 2002, Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:
In addition, it should decrease startup time: Python won't need to locate that many files anymore.
It also decreases the total size of the binary distribution slightly.
Maybe _sre is used by most apps (though I doubt even that). But _socket, select, winreg, mmap and the others are definitely not. On Unix, all extensions are built as shared libraries, except the ones that are needed by setup.py to be able to build extensions; it looks like only posix, errno, _sre and symtable are built statically.
I'd say that making more extensions static on Windows would increase start time of modules that don't use those extensions.
_sre is used by any application that imports 'os'. That (IMHO) is almost every non-trivial Python program. Of course, we shouldn't be guessing about startup times. Someone should actually try building two versions and comparing them. -- Duncan Booth duncan@rcp.co.uk int month(char *p){return(124864/((p[0]+p[1]-p[2]&0x1f)+1)%12)["\5\x8\3" "\6\7\xb\1\x9\xa\2\0\4"];} // Who said my code was obscure?