Comment by scrollaway
8 years ago
First time I hear about this, and I've looked for alternatives to cxfreeze and its cousins in the past.
Any time I see something like this, I feel like I'm hearing about some homeopathic cancer cure. If Nuitka actually does what it says it does, it's solving a big recurrent problem for the Python community, so why is nobody talking about it?
Having followed Nuitka since it started, I can offer my perspective:
- Before Nuitka, someone already did a "Python->C" compiler along similar lines: translate the Python source code into the C calls that the interpreter will make, eliminating any interpreter overhead and providing C compiler optimization opporunities. That thing sort-of-worked (with v1.5.2 IIRC), but was cumbersome to use and delivered a meager 5% performance improvement for the cases it did support; it was abandoned.
- Nuitka's plan had the same thing as a starting phase; people told the Nuitka guy that he's wasting his time based on prior experience. When he actually delivered a mostly-robust working version (much more usable than the previous attempts ever were), it indeed delivered only a small performance gain compared to CPython.
- As a result, it seemed like the community believed both that the whole thing is futile, and that the developer is fighting windmills.
- a lot of time passes, Nuitka keeps improving with better analysis, translation, compilation, etc - but the community has already cemented its opinion.
- Nuitka remains a useful magic system known to few.
I would say that the early Nuitka versions (and the prior attempt) gave it a SEP field that has never been lifted, and short of e.g. DropBox or Facebook adopting it, nothing will lift it either.
I think Nuitka is an answer looking for a problem. Usually people move away from Python. If they really need more low level performance, or implement whatever system in Python itself, to solve the problem Nuitka might solve for them.
That said, it's a wonderful project, I hope more and more people will find it useful for them.
Quite the opposite, distributing a Python binary is one of the most popular demand in the community, along with better multiple core and a JIT.
It used to be packaging and V2/V3, but those are fading away now with wheels everywhere and 3.4+ being the new love affair. Python has been in the habit of improving every year, steadily for 28 years, solving the problems the community asked every time.
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That's the question I'm asking.
Not only it's a beautiful tool, but the author has been quietly and steadily working on it for 8 years. Compatibility is the number one goal.
The guy has a lot of rigor and humility, so maybe communication suffered ?
Let's give it some visibility then. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16980704
hg allows loading modules at runtime. maybe thats a problem.
I doubt it, since you can pass pass manually a list of all modules you want nuikta to embed with --recurse-plugins=MODULE/PACKAGE
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I collect ideas, especially weird and powerful ideas.
I've learned not to try to talk about it because of that question: "If foo is so great, why isn't everybody using it?"
It's one of the single greatest frustrations of my life. I don't know. I've never made any progress on it. The best you can say is, "Well, that seems to be human nature." The world is full of "magic beans" and most people seem interested in banging their heads against the wall.
(Did you know, you can make a 140hp engine that fits in the volume of two stacked pizza boxes and has only one moving part?)
Anyhow, Nuitka is great, it does do all that.
And the creator is a freakin' saint for putting up with the way he's been treated by the Python community, is my opinion.
Also, you should write a blig about those ideas. Or a place where we can share it, but in a non tin foil way / silver bullet way.
Eg: after 7 years of having malaria, one tropical disease doctor explained to me that we have been able to cure malaria for years. Generalist doctors usually don't know it because they don't encounter the disease often enough to keep up to date. It's kind of hard pill to swallow given that i always though you had it for life.
I'd love to, but from experience I can tell you, you just get skeptics and crackpots and scammers and suckers crawling out of the woodwork and gumming up the scientific/inventive process. That, combined with the apathy of the general public, means that it's just hard to get a real conversation going in a "non tin foil way / silver bullet way".
It also means that a lot of great ideas go nowhere, or take 50-100 years to get adopted. Your experience with malaria is an example. My condolences btw, that sounds terrible.
In any event, there's Rex Research: http://rexresearch.com/1index.htm (IGNORE HOW IT LOOKS!!!) This fellow has been collecting inventions and other weird stuff for decades, since before the internet. He used to run little ads in the back of Popular Science and others like that. Yes, the site looks a little... creative, and much of the stuff he lists is just crackpottery, but the stuff that isn't is mind-blowing.
Just one example, one of my favorite devices: the Hilsch-Ranque Vortex Tube. It's a "Maxwell's Demon" (although it does not violate Thermodynamics. Of course.)
> The vortex tube, also known as the Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube, is a mechanical device that separates a compressed gas into hot and cold streams. It has no moving parts.
http://rexresearch.com/ranque/ranque.htm
You can actually buy these to go on the end of a compressor and provide "spot cold" for cooling off whatever. I emailed a company that sells them once to ask what would happen if you set it up in a feedback loop so that the cold output was chilling the input line, but they were uninterested.
Oh hey, time marches on and it now has a wikipedia page! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_tube
Anyhow, like I said, I'd like to blog about this stuff but most of the people who would be into it would either haters or credulous fools. Speaking of which, youtube has lots of videos of people talking about and sometimes even demonstrating things. But again, you have to wade through all kinds of bullshit and scammers and hoaxers and skeptics and credulous fools to actually find the handful of people who take this stuff seriously but can maintain a proper detached scientific attitude to actually investigate it. YMMV
Saint is the word given he has be working really seriously at it for 8 years, alone, never complaining, and giving away everything without any recognition.
Bingo.
It's a function of how many people really need that solution. It's high enough that it exists. It's low enough that it's not a thing you do by default or even talk about much. But if you need it and it's compatible with your code - it's there.
Actually any sysadmin or scripter wannabe could benefit from nuikta. Twitter even invented pex because of that. Nuikta took some time to become 100% compatible with the latest versions of cPython, but now it's the case so let's all enjoy it.
I like nuitka and what it's doing, but it's just not that comfortable in every single situation. There's value in seeing the source and being able to modify it in place without a compile&redeploy steps. There's value in dtrace support which as far as I can tell nuitka doesn't have. And other small things like existing profilers which work with cpython stack traces specifically.
So if there is a reason to use it - great. But that's not every situation.
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