[niemeyer@conectiva.com: Re: [Python-Dev] Python's footprint]

[Martin v. Loewis]

> Now that 2.2 is history (well, kind of ;-), would it be the time to
> think about this again?

By "consideration early in 2.3's life cycle", the OP probably meant
that a patch should be posted to SF. Are you willing to implement the
complete change (i.e. create a patch that changes each and every
source file)? If so, please post one to SF. You may want to start this
slowly, first creating only the infrastructure and touching a single
file (say, stringobject.c)

I'd personally like to see opportunities for more magic used. E.g. in
a compiler that uses sections, putting all doc strings into a single
section might be desirable. They will be a contiguous fragment of the
python executable, which helps on demand-paged systems to reduce the
startup time. Going further, it might be possible to strip off "unused
sections" from the binary after it has been linked, deferring the
choice of doc string presence to the installation time.

For that to work, we'd first need to know what compilers offer what
syntax to implement such magic, then generalize it to the right macro.
If that is a desirable goal, I'd be willing to investigate how to
achieve things with gcc, on ELF systems.

Regards,
Martin