16 January 2015

Kay Hayen
Nuitka Python compiler

Nuitka Release 0.5.8

This is to inform you about the new stable release of Nuitka. It is the extremely compatible Python compiler, “download now”.

This release has mainly a focus on cleanups and compatibility improvements. It also advances standalone support, and a few optimization improvements, but it mostly is a maintenance release, attacking long standing issues.

Bug Fixes

• Compatibility Windows macOS: Fix importing on case insensitive systems.

  It was not always working properly, if there was both a package Something and something, by merit of having files Something/__init__.py and something.py.

• Standalone: The search path was preferring system directories and therefore could have conflicting DLLs.

• Fix, the optimization of getattr with predictable result was crashing the compilation. This was a regression, fixed in 0.5.7.1 already.

• Compatibility: The name mangling inside classes also needs to be applied to global variables.

• Fix, providing clang++ for CXX was mistakenly thinking of it as a g++ and making version checks on it.

• Python3: Declaring __class__ global is now a SyntaxError before Python3.4.

• Standalone Python3: Making use of module state in extension modules was not working properly.

New Features

• The filenames of source files as found in the __file__ attribute are now made relative in standalone mode.

  This should make it more apparent if things outside of the distribution folder are used, at the cost of tracebacks. Expect the default ability to copy the source code along in an upcoming release.

• Added experimental standalone mode support for PyQt5. At least headless mode should be working, plugins (needed for anything graphical) are not yet copied and will need more work.

Cleanup

• No longer using imp.find_module anymore. To solve the casing issues we needed to make our own module finding implementation finally.

• The name mangling was handled during code generation only. Moved to tree building instead.

• More code generation cleanups. The compatible line numbers are now attached during tree building and therefore better preserved, as well as that code no longer polluting code generation as much.

Organisational

• No more packages for openSUSE 12.1/12.2/12.3 and Fedora 17/18/19 as requested by the openSUSE Build Service.

• Added RPM packages for Fedora 21 and CentOS 7 on openSUSE Build Service.

Tests

• Lots of test refinements for the CPython test suites to be run continuously in Buildbot for both Windows and Linux.

Summary

This release brings about two major changes, each with the risk to break things.

One is that we finally started to have our own import logic, which has the risk to cause breakage, but apparently currently rather improved compatibility. The case issues were not fixable with standard library code.

The second one is that the __file__ attributes for standalone mode is now no longer pointing to the original install and therefore will expose missing stuff sooner. This will have to be followed up with code to scan for missing “data” files later on.

For SSA based optimization, there are cleanups in here, esp. the one removing the name mangling, allowing to remove special code for class variables. This makes the SSA tree more reliable. Hope is that the big step (forward propagation through variables) can be made in one of the next releases.

Article about Nuitka Standalone Mode   Nuitka Release 0.5.9