Kay Hayen: Nuitka Release 0.6.14
This is to inform you about the new stable release ofNuitka. It is the extremely compatible Python compiler,“download now”.
This release has few, but important bug fixes. The main focus was on expanding standalone support, esp. for PySide2, but also and in general with plugins added that workaroundpkg_resourcesusage for version information.
Also an important new features was added, e.g. the project configuration in the main file should prove to be very useful.
Bug Fixes
Compatibility: Fix, modules that failed to import, should be retried on next import.
So far we only ever executed the module body once, but that is not how it’s supposed to be. Instead, only if it’s insys.modulesthat should happen, which is the case after successful import.
Compatibility: Fix, constantFalsevalues in right hand side ofand/orconditions were generating wrong code if the left side was of knownboolshape too.
Standalone: Fix, addstylesQt plugins to list of sensible plugins.
Otherwise no mouse hover events are generated on some platforms.
Compatibility: Fix, relativefromimports beyond level 1 were not loadingg modules from packages if necessary. Fixed in 0.6.13.3 already.
Standalone: ThecryptoDLL check for Qt bindings was wrong. Fixed in 0.6.13.2 already.
Standalone: Added experimental support for PySide6, but for good results, 6.1 will be needed.
Standalone: Added support for newer matplotlib. Fixed in 0.6.12.1 already.
Standalone: Reverted changes related topkg_resourcesthat were causing regressions. Fixed in 0.6.13.1 already.
Standalone: Adding missing implicit dependency forcytoolzpackage. Fixed in 0.6.13.1 already.
Standalone: Matching for package names to not suggest recompile for was broken and didn’t match. Fixed in 0.6.13.1 already.
New Features
Added support for project options.
When found in the filename provided, Nuitka will inject options to the commandline, such that it becomes possible to do a complex project with only using
Refer to the User Manual for a table of directives and the variables allowed to be used.
Added option to include whole data directory structures in standalone.
The new option--include-data-dirwas added and is mostly required for onefile mode, but recommended for standalone too.
Addedpkg-resourcesplugin.
This one can resolve code like this at compile time without any need for pip metadata to be present or used.
Standalone: Also process early imports in optimization.
Otherwise plugins cannot work on standard library modules. This makes it possible to handle them as well.
Optimization
Faster binary operations.
Applying lessons learnt during the enhancements for in-place operations that initially gave worse results than some manual code, we apply the same tricks for all binary operations, which speeds them up by significant margins, e.g. 30% for float addition, 25% for Python int addition, and still 6% for Python int addition.
More direct optimization of unary operations on constant value.
Without this,-1was not directly a constant value, but had to go through the unary-operation, which it still does, but now it’s done at tree building time.
More direct optimization fornotin branches.
Invertible comparisons, i.e.is/isnotandin/notindo not have do be done during optimization. This mainly avoids noise during optimization from such unimportant steps.
More direct optimization for constant slices.
These are used in Python3 for all subscripts, e.g.a[1:2]will useslice(1,2)effectively. For Python2 they are used less often, but still. This also avoids a lot of noise during optimization, mostly on Python3
Scons: Avoid writing database to disk entirely.
This saves a bit of disk churn and makes it unnecessary to specify the location such that it doesn’t collide between Python versions.
For optimization passes, use previous max total as minimum for next pass. That will usually be a more accurate result, rather than starting from 1 again. Part of 0.6.13.1 already.
Enhancements to the branch merging improve the scalability of Nuitka somewhat, although the merging itself is still not very scalable, there are some modules that are very slow to optimize still.
Useordersetif available over the inline copy forOrderedSetwhich is much faster and improves Nuitka compile times.
Makepkgutila hard import too, this is in preparation of more optimization for its functions.
Organizational
Upstream patches forPySide6have been contributed and merged into the development branchdev. Full support should be available once this is released as part of 6.1 which is waiting for Qt 6.1 naturally.
Patches forPySide2are available to commercial customers, seePySide2 supportpage.
Formatted all documents withrstfmtand made that part of the commit hook for Nuitka. It now works for all documents we have.
Updated inline copy oftqdmto 4.59.0 which ought to address spurious errors given.
User Manual: Remove--show-progressfrom the tutoral. The default progress bar is then disabled, and is actually much nicer to use.
Developer Manual: Added description of how context managers should be named.
Cleanup language for some warnings and outputs.
It was still using obsolete “recursion” language rather than talking about “following imports”, which is the new one.
Cleanups
Remove dead code related to constants marshal, the data composer has replaced this.
Avoid internal API usage for loading extension modules on Linux, there is a function insysmodule to get the ld flags.
Tests
Fix, theonlymode wasn’t working properly.
Use new project options feature for specific options in basic tests allowing to remove them from the test runner.
Summary
For PySide2 things became more perfect, but it takes upstream patches unfortunately such that only PySide6.1 will be working out of the box outside of the commercial offering. We will also attempt to provide workarounds, but there are some things that cannot be done that way.
This release added some more scalability to the optimization process, however there will be more work needed to make efficient branch merges.
For onefile, a feature to include whole directories had been missing, and could not easily be achieved with the existing options. This further rounds this up, now what’s considered missing is compression and macOS support, both of which should be coming in a future release.
For the performance side of things, the binary operator work can actually yield pretty good gains, with double digit improvements, but this covers only so much. Much more C types and better type tracing would be needed, but there was no progress on this front. Future releases will have to revisit the type tracing to make sure, we know more about loop variables, etc. so we can achieve the near C speed we are looking for, at least in the field ofintperformance.
This release has largely been driven by theNuitka Commercialoffering and needs for compatibility with more code, which is of course always a good thing.
