On Jan 31, 2010, at 11:04 AM, Raymond Hettinger wrote:

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It does this by allowing many different byte compilation files (.pyc files) to be co-located with the Python source file (.py file).

It would be nice if all the compilation files could be tucked into one single zipfile per directory to reduce directory clutter.

It has several benefits besides tidiness. It hides the implementation details of when magic numbers get shifted. And it may allow faster start-up times when the zipfile is in the disk cache.

This is closer in spirit to the original (uncirculated) PEP which called for fat pyc files, but without the complicated implementation details. It's still an interesting approach to explore.

Writer concurrency can be handled with dot-lock files, but that does incur some extra overhead, such as the remove() of the lock file.

-Barry