py2many VS Nuitka

> Another problem is that there are hundreds of built-in library functions that need to be compiled from Python from C

An approach I've advocated as one of the main authors of py2many is that all of the python builtin functions be written in a subset of python[1] and then compiled into native code. This has the benefit of avoiding GIL, problems with C-API among other things.

Do checkout the examples here[2] which work out of the box for many of the 8-9 supported backends.

[1] https://github.com/py2many/py2many/blob/main/doc/langspec.md

https://github.com/py2many/py2many/blob/main/doc/langspec.md

Reimplement a large enough, commonly used subset of python stdlib using this dialect and we may be in the business of writing cross platform apps (perhaps start with android and Ubuntu/Gnome)

For py2many, there is an informal specification here:

https://github.com/py2many/py2many/blob/main/doc/langspec.md

Would be great if all the authors of "python-like" languages get together and come up with a couple of specs.

I say a couple, because there are ones that support the python runtime (such as cython) and the ones which don't (like py2many).

It'd not fully solve your issue, but have you ever seen https://github.com/py2many/py2many ?

Cython doesn't consume python3 type hints and needs special type hints of its own. But it's certainly more mature than other players in the field.

What we need is a rpython suitable for app programming and a stdlib written in that dialect.

https://github.com/py2many/py2many/blob/main/doc/langspec.md

No intermediate AST. To understand the various stages of transpilation and separation of language specific and independent rewriters, this file is a good starting point:

https://github.com/adsharma/py2many/blob/main/py2many/cli.py...

Link to the test that's relevant for this discussion:

https://github.com/adsharma/py2many/blob/main/tests/cases/in...

This is an explicit deviation from python's bigint, which doesn't map very well to systemsey languages. The next logical step is to build on this to have dependent and refinement types.

Work in progress here:

https://github.com/adsharma/Typpete

This is a good place to mention https://nuitka.net/ which aims to compile python programs into standalone binaries.

For Python, you could make a proper deployment binary using Nuitka (in standalone mode – avoid onefile mode for this). I'm not pretending it's as easy as building a Go executable: you may have to do some manual hacking for more unusual unusual packages, and I don't think you can cross compile. I think a key element you're getting at is that Go executables have very few dependencies on OS packages, but with Python (once you've sorted the actual Python dependencies) you only need the packages used for manylinux [2], which is not too onerous.

[1] https://nuitka.net/

[2] https://peps.python.org/pep-0599/#the-manylinux2014-policy

glee is rich in blogging features but has some drawbacks. One of the main drawbacks is its compatibility with multiple operating systems and system architectures. We lost one potential customer due to glee incompatibility in macOS. Another major issue is the deployment time. We built the first version of glee entirely in Python and used nuitka, nuitka compiles Python programs into a single executable binary file. We need to create three separate stages for creating executable binaries for Windows, Mac, and Linux in deployment, and it takes around 20 minutes to complete.

There is already an AOT compiler for Python: Nuitka[0]. But I don't think it's much faster.

And then there is mypyc[1] which uses mypy's static type annotations but is only slightly faster.

And various other compilers like Numba and Cython that work with specialized dialects of Python to achieve better results, but then it's not quite Python anymore.

[0] https://nuitka.net/

[1] https://github.com/python/mypy/tree/master/mypyc

Nuitka deals pretty well with those in general: https://nuitka.net/

Hi HN,

Has anyone explored Nuitka [1] and developed understanding from a blank slate?

Is there any toy version of this, so that one can start playing with the language translation concepts?

Is there any underlying theory/inspiration upon which this project is built?

Are there any similar projects, in say other languages?

[1] https://github.com/Nuitka/Nuitka

That's more of cultural problem in the Python community.

If I provide an end user software to my client written an Python (so not a backend, not a lib...), I will compile it with nuitka (https://github.com/Nuitka/Nuitka) and hide the stack trace (https://www.bitecode.dev/p/why-and-how-to-hide-the-python-st...) to provide a stand alone executable.

This means the users don't have to know it's made with Python or install anything, and it just works.

However, Python is not like Go or Rust, and providing such an installer requires more than work, so a huge part of the user base (which have a lot of non professional coders) don't have the skill, time or resources to do it.

And few people make the promotion of it.

I should write an article on that because really, nobody wants to setup python just to use a tool.

As for a simpler option, you could use a "compiler": https://github.com/Nuitka/Nuitka

> Your comment would make sense if Python code could be compiled into x86 or ARM assembly in the first place.

It can actually be compiled (or transpiled) into C code [1] with few limitations, so I can't see why not.

[1] https://github.com/Nuitka/Nuitka