[Python-Dev] _sre as part of python.dll

[Martin v. Loewis]

Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> writes:

> But is the startup time of apps that use a lot of stuff the most
> important thing?  I'd say that the startup time of apps that *don't*
> use a lot of stuff is more important.  I'm not sure that making the
> binary bigger doesn't slow it down.

I'm pretty sure that it doesn't. On Unix, the system performs a
copy-on-write mmap of the executable. No disk access is done until
page faults trigger a disk read. I believe Windows uses a similar
mechanism. The size of the executable is irrelevant (if you have no
relocations); only the part of the executable that is used matters.

On the other hand, on my Linux installation, importing a module costs
35 system calls if the module is not found, and no PYTHONPATH is set;
every directory in PYTHONPATH adds four additional system calls.

> Yes, please.  We switched to building almost all extensions as shared
> libs when we switched away from Modules/Setup to setup.py.

For modules that require configuration, this was a good thing - now
setup.py will autoconfigure them. For modules that require no
additional libraries, I hope that this decision will be reverted some
day.

Regards,
Martin