[Python-Dev] Building a Faster Python

[Ronald Oussoren]

On 22 Jul, 2013, at 3:01, Larry Hastings <larry at hastings.org> wrote:

> On 07/21/2013 04:36 PM, Raymond Hettinger wrote:
>> Our current Mac OS X builds use GCC-4.2.
>> 
>> On Python2.7, I ran a comparison of gcc-4.2.1 builds
>> versus gcc-4.8.1 and found that the latter makes a much
>> faster Python.  PyBench2.0 shows the total running time
>> dropping from 5653ms to 4571ms.  The code is uniformly
>> better in just about every category.
>> 
> 
> I know that newer Microsoft compilers tend to drop support for older operating systems, and often that means the binaries simply won't work on those operating systems.  (Yes, technically it's the libraries that break the older code.)
> 
> Are Apple's compilers the same?  Or do they tend to support all the old versions of OS X?

The compiler's included with Xcode 4 cannot generate code for PowerPC machines, other than that it should be possible to generate code for older machines with the latest Xcode version.  I have a Python installation on my machine that I use to generate app distributions for a 10.5 machine, and AFAIK this would also work for deploying to 10.4.

The hard part is usually convincing autotools-using projects to not use APIs that are available on the build machine but not on the deployment machine.

Ronald