[Python-Dev] Investigating time for `import requests`

[Raymond Hettinger]

> On Oct 1, 2017, at 7:34 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
> 
> In principle re.compile() itself could be made lazy -- return a
> regular exception object that just holds the string, and then compiles
> and caches it the first time it's used. Might be tricky to do in a
> backwards compatibility way if it moves detection of invalid regexes
> from compile time to use time, but it could be an opt-in flag.

ISTM that someone writing ``re.compile(pattern)`` is explicitly saying they want the regex to be pre-compiled.   For cache on first-use, we already have a way to do that with ``re.search(pattern, some string)`` which compiles and then caches.

What would be more interesting would be to have a way to save the compiled regex in a pyc file so that it can be restored on load rather than recomputed.

Also, we should remind ourselves that making more and more things lazy is a false optimization unless those things never get used.  Otherwise, all we're doing is ending the timing before all the relevant work is done. If the lazy object does get used, we've made the actual total execution time worse (because of the overhead of the lazy evaluation logic).


Raymond