Python compilation ??

[Duncan Booth]

Steve Holden <steve at holdenweb.com> wrote:

> Absolutely. I should, of course, have said that only imported modules 
> have the results of the compilation stored as a .pyc file.
> 
> One must presume this is to save the file write time during development 
> when the program is almost always different fro the last time you ran it.

Or possibly to save disc space if you have a lot of scripts.

I think it is a reasonable compromise: if you are running a script it seems 
unlikely that you will notice the additional time to compile one script on 
top of the time to load the interpreter, but if your script imports a few 
hundred other modules the time to compile them is definitely noticeable.