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

[Sjoerd Mullender]

On Fri, Aug 9 2002 Duncan Booth wrote:

> 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.

Not on my system it isn't!

It's true that _sre does get imported whenever I start Python, but
that is not because it gets imported by os.  There is an import of re
in posixpath (imported by os), but that is inside the function
expandvars which is not called during import.

In my case site.py imports distutils.util because Python decides it is
called from the build directory.

-- Sjoerd Mullender <sjoerd@acm.org>