[Python-Dev] Anyone building Python --without-doc-strings?

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Sat, 26 Jan 2013 17:03:59 +0100
Stefan Krah <stefan at bytereef.org> wrote:
> Stefan Krah <stefan at bytereef.org> wrote:
> > I'm not sure how accurate the output is for measuring these things, but
> > according to ``ls'' and ``du'' the option is indeed quite worthless:
> > 
> > ./configure CFLAGS="-Os -s" LDFLAGS="-s" && make
> >   1.8M Jan 26 16:36 python
> > ./configure --without-doc-strings CFLAGS="-Os -s" LDFLAGS="-s" && make
> >   1.6M Jan 26 16:33 python
> 
> The original contribution *was* in fact aiming for "10% smaller", see:
> 
> http://docs.python.org/release/2.3/whatsnew/node20.html
> 
> So apparently people thought it was useful.

After a bit of digging, I found the following discussions:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2001-November/018444.html
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-January/019392.html
http://bugs.python.org/issue505375

Another reason for accepting the patch seemed to be that it introduced
the Py_DOCSTR() macros, which were viewed as helpful for other reasons
(some people talked about localizing docstrings).

I would point out that if 200 KB is really a big win for someone, then
Python (and especially Python 3) is probably not the best language for
them.

It is also ironic how the executable size went up since then (from 0.6
to more than 1.5 MB) :-)

Regards

Antoine.