[Python-Dev] Python startup time

[Ben Hoyt]

Yes, agreed that startup time matters for scripting. I was talking to
someone on the Google Cloud SDK (CLI) team recently, and they said startup
time is a big deal for them ... it's especially problematic for shell tab
completion helpers, because every time you press tab the shell has to load
your Python program to do the completion. Even a couple dozen milliseconds
is noticeable when you're typing quickly.

-Ben

On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 3:15 PM, Larry Hastings <larry at hastings.org> wrote:

>
>
> On 07/19/2017 05:59 AM, Victor Stinner wrote:
>
> Mercurial startup time is already 45.8x slower than Git whereas tested
> Mercurial runs on Python 2.7.12. Now try to sell Python 3 to Mercurial
> developers, with a startup time 2x - 3x slower...
>
>
> When Matt Mackall spoke at the Python Language Summit some years back, I
> recall that he specifically complained about Python startup time.  He said
> Python 3 "didn't solve any problems for [them]"--they'd already solved
> their Unicode hygiene problems--and that Python's slow startup time was
> already a big problem for them.  Python 3 being *even slower* to start
> was absolutely one of the reasons why they didn't want to upgrade.
>
> You might think "what's a few milliseconds matter".  But if you run
> hundreds of commands in a shell script it adds up.  git's speed is one of
> the few bright spots in its UX, and hg's comparative slowness here is a
> palpable disadvantage.
>
>
> So please continue efforts for make Python startup even faster to beat
> all other programming languages, and finally convince Mercurial to
> upgrade ;-)
>
>
> I believe Mercurial is, finally, slowly porting to Python 3.
>
> https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/Python3
>
> Nevertheless, I can't really be annoyed or upset at them moving slowly to
> adopt Python 3, as Matt's objections were entirely legitimate.
>
>
> Cheers,
>
>
> */arry*
>
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