Releases 1.0 — 1.9

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  • Releases 1.0 — 1.9

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In this document, we track the per-version changes of 1.x and comments of old Nuitka release before version 2.0 was released.

Nuitka Release 1.9

This release has focused on improved startup time and compatibility with lazy loaders which has resulted in some optimization. There are also the usual amounts of bug fixes. For macOS and Linux there are lots of improvements that should make standalone mode for them robust with many more configurations.

Bug Fixes

• Nuitka Action: Fix, the parsing code intended for the github action was not working as advertised. Fixed in 1.8.1 already.

• Standalone: Follow soundfile change for their DLL names. Fixed in 1.8.1 already.

• MSYS: Fix, the recent change to detect their Python flavor with 3.11 was done wrong. Fixed in 1.8.1 already.

• Windows: Ignore MS API DLLs found from %PATH%. We only ignored them because they come from the Windows system folder, but if any program has them, then we did include them. Fixed in 1.8.1 already.

• Standalone: Fix, calendar is used by time built-in module actually and therefore must be included. Fixed in 1.8.1 already.

• Standalone: Added data file for unstructured package. Fixed in 1.8.1 already.

• Standalone: Added data file for grpc package. Fixed in 1.8.1 already.

• Standalone: Added missing dependency for skimage. Fixed in 1.8.1 already.

• Python3.11: The dictionary copy code could crash on special kinds of dictionaries. Fixed in 1.8.2 already.

• Standalone: Added data file required by ens of web3 package. Fixed in 1.8.2 already.

• Fix, multiprocessing could not access attributes living in __main__ module, but only things elsewhere, breaking minimal examples. Fixed in 1.8.2 already.

• Reports: Fix, the license of some packages in case it is UNKNOWN was not handling all the cases that wheels expose. Fixed in 1.8.2 already.

• Fix, using --include-module and --include-package was behaving identical for packages. Made the former not include all of the package, but only the top level and what that uses.

• Standalone: Added support for the lightning package. Fixed in 1.8.3 already.

• Distutils: Fix, the platform tag was sometimes incorrect for wheels built. Fixed in 1.8.3 already.

• Compatibility: Make the PySide2/PySide6 signal connection workaround more robust. It was not handling reuse of the same method properly and insisted on changing __name__ which some objects apparently dislike a lot. Fixed in 1.8.4 already.

• Windows: Fix, need to use short path for the Python installation prefix, as it might be Unicode path as well. Fixed in 1.8.4 already.

• Fix, output spec %NONE% was not compiling anymore. Fixed in 1.8.4 already.

• Reports: Avoid having short paths for DLL sources on Windows. Fixed in 1.8.4 already.

• Fix, catch provided metadata from command line --include-distribution-metadata without including the package at runtime. Fixed in 1.8.4 already.

• Python3.10+: Fix, was not properly initializing indicator variable used in the match re-formulation. The generated code still work, but this was an error on the logical level to use a variable un-initialized. Fixed in 1.8.4 already.

• Standalone: Added missing DLLs for rlottie-python. Fixed in 1.8.4 already.

• Standalone: Added missing implicit dependencies and also avoid duplication of DLLs for the av package. Fixed in 1.8.4 already.

• Fix, was not handling errors when creating distribution objects. Fixed in 1.8.4 already.

• macOS: Remove extended attributes from DLLs, e.g. finder can add them and it prevents code signing. Fixed in 1.8.4 already.

• macOS: Workaround for signing tkinter data files properly, we just exclude the problematic ones, as they are going to be unused. Fixed in 1.8.4 already.

• Standalone: Added hidden dependency of curl_cffi package. Fixed in 1.8.5 already.

• Standalone: Added hidden dependency of tensorflow package. Fixed in 1.8.5 already.

• Standalone: Added more kivymd data files. Fixed in 1.8.5 already.

• Standalone: Added implicit dependency for winloop package. Fixed in 1.8.6 already.

• Windows: Fix, do not resolve main program executable filename to long filename. Fixed in 1.8.5 already.

• Windows: Fix, ignore ucrtbase runtime DLLs found from %PATH% as well. Fixed in 1.8.6 already.

• Compatibility: Fix, the dill-compat plugin was regressed and support for dill version 0.3 was added.

• Fix, need to include package name for joblib usage with --python-flag=-m to work properly.

• Windows: Added support for newest joblib too, we no longer need to error for using the latest one.

• Fix, attribute lookups becoming hard through node factories didn’t annotate possible exceptions.

• Standalone: Added support for huggingface_hub vendored lazy loader variant.

• Standalone: Added support for datasets module.

• Plugins: Handle default plugin of matplotlib a lot better. Be more graceful when the query of the default one fails, and point to MPLBACKEND usage. Otherwise inform the user of the backend used for matplotlib so it can be checked.

• Fix, --include-module on a package was including all of it rather than just top level, which was what it should do. For including the full package, there is --include-package instead.

• macOS: Fix, need to check dependencies for the selected target arch precisely, otherwise DLLs and extension modules for the other arch can cause errors for our dependency analysis in standalone mode.

  • Also added support for getting DLL exported symbols on macOS which then allows to properly distinguish extension modules from mere DLLs on macOS, and not just Linux.

• MSYS2: Fix, the GTK DLL name changed again.

• Compatibility: Added support for .zip files being in python path as well.

• Fix, when a sub-package module import is rejected for whatever reason, the programs attempt to import it, still implies an attempt to import the parent module. For extension modules in accelerated mode, this is of course common, but the containing package if any, is of course still to be included.

• Fix, PySide6 in accelerated mode needs workarounds too, previously only standalone mode was avoiding the corruptions it was causing.

• Fix, make the PySide2/PySide6 signal connection workaround also fix disconnection only. For signals that only ever got disconnected, but never connected, the workaround was not applied.

• MSYS2: For standalone add more GI dlls.

• Fix, inline copies of e.g. tqdm could be detected during compilation and even in place of the real package.

• Standalone: Added proper support for timm without disabling JIT generally.

• Python3.11: Fix, frozen stdlib modules must be turned off

  Otherwise the value of os.__file__ becomes wrong, and maybe more issues, as Nuitka is more compatible to full modules than the frozen modules are for standalone mode at least.

• Python2: Avoid RuntimeWarning when using inline copy of tqdm.

• Standalone: Added support for newer pydantic and its lazy loader.

• Standalone: Add config for font data files of qtawesome package.

• Plugins: Added workaround for PySide6 enums checking bytecode when some older enum values are used. The PySide6 means to detect method calls vs. type lookups to decide if to inject the default value for a flag value. With our workaround, enums behave as expected without that check being possible.

• Standalone: Added support for gradio package.

• Python3.6+: Added support for non-latin (for example Chinese) module names, these were not working correctly yet.

• Python3: Fix, star importing from modules with non-UTF8 encodable names in the module dictionary crashed.

• Python2: Fix, couldn’t list directories with unicode filenames in them, so that e.g. a Python3 created build directory with unicode module names was not possible to fully delete.

• Compatibility: Added missing as_posix method to our resource reader objects.

• Standalone: Added missing DLLs for PyAutoIt package.

• Standalone: Added data files for the flask_restx package, for which --include-package-data also wouldn’t work, due to its strange handling when running in frozen mode.

• Standalone: Added more metadata requirements for transformers package.

• Standalone: Added support for newer transformers package.

• Standalone: Added data files for yapf vendored lib2to3 package.

• Plugins: Fix, was crashing on module patterns of submodules not existing in the yaml config implicit dependencies.

New Features

• Plugins: Introduce an explicit hard import registry, that now can be expanded at compile time by plugins.

• Plugins: Added support for lazy delayed loading, which removes the need for include-pyi-file as we inline its effect at compile time. Also, the dependencies of these kinds of packages no longer need to be overreaching and can analyze the code again. This is using the hard import registry plugin interface.

• Linux: Standalone builds with PyPI packages no longer include system DLLs unless a new Yaml configuration for DLLs called package-system-dlls is configured, which will be necessary for GTK bindings probably. With this the included DLLs will more often be only ones suitable for use on other OSes. This should make Linux standalone somewhat easier, but still need to compile on old OS.

• Reports: For distributions include the installer name, so we can tell pip, conda or system packages apart better.

• Reports: For included modules, we now also attribute the distributions it directly uses modules from and the distribution the module itself belongs to was added as an attribute as well.

• Reports: Added excluded module reasons to reporting, so that it can be told directly, which imports were found, but not followed to. Also added report reader capable of providing information from a compilation report.

• Added support for FIPS compliance, a US security standard by NIST, that caused parts of Python used by Nuitka to be flagged.

• Watch: Added option to control the update mode, handles now rc versions, so it can be used before and after Nuitka releases easily.

• Watch: Added timeout for how long programs are allow to run.

• Watch: Added ability to recognize fork loops happening, so test cases of e.g. joblib do not suddenly go wild on a break change in that or other packages.

• macOS: The --list-package-dlls now needs to check target arch options, so we now delay the non-compiling options execution until it’s set, which also makes it cleaner code. Also, we can now distinguish real Python extension modules from mere DLLs on macOS too.

• Standalone: Also ignore av and cv2 DLL collisions, making it more generic.

• Standalone: Make tk-inter plugin more robust. Detect the tkinter version used and scan for its paths. Use path used when compiling tcl from source and check data directory paths for tcl and tk for expected files, and error out if they are not found. With these changes self-compiled Python as e.g. used in our commercial Linux container is supported too now.

• Enhanced support for self compiled Python by using link libraries needed for static linked extension modules. This allows a better commercial Linux container build mainly.

Optimization

• Optimization: Enhanced handling of aliased variables.

  Was not converting variable assignments from variables created during re-formulations to the dedicated nodes, potentially missing out on optimizations specific to that case, because it was then not recognized to be non-generic anymore later.

  Was not optimizing comparisons and truth checks for temporary variable references, missing out a lot of opportunities for optimization of code coming from re-formulations.

  When a variable is aliased, but the source variable is one that cannot escape or is even very hard value, we were not annotating that as well as possible, but now e.g. comparisons with constant values that are immutable are done even if aliased.

  Remove knowledge of variables assigned to other variables only if that value can actually escape, otherwise that has no real point.

• Use variable length encoding for data blob size values. This removes size constraints in some cases, but also makes the representation of list, tuple, dict more compact, since they commonly have only a few elements, but we used 4 bytes for length, where the average should be close to one 1 byte per length item now.

• Faster CRC32 with zlib, leading to much faster program startup, and faster checksums for cached mode of onefile, improving that a lot as well.

• Windows: Updated MinGW64 to latest winlibs package, should produce even faster code and show stopping bugs in its binutils have apparently been fixed. This should now link a lot faster with LTO, due to using multiple processes.

• Added support for builtins.open as hard import to open.

• Scalability: Make sure we actually use __slots__ for our classes. Variables, code generation context, iteration handles, and type shapes didn’t really use those and that should speed their use up and therefore reduce Python compile time and memory usage.

• Standalone: Removed one more automatic stdlib module textwrap as it otherwise uses a runner code with test code that is bloating with hello world code.

• Fedora: Enabled LTO linking by default as well, it’s working, but Fedora Python is still not really good to use, since it doesn’t allow static linking of libpython.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid pytest usage in pooch package. Added in 1.8.1 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Remove pdb usage from pyparsing package. Added in 1.8.2 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Remove unittest usage in bitarray. module. Added in 1.8.2 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid lightning to cause use of its lightning.testing framework.

• Anti-Bloat: Added override that that torch but only it can use unittest, it will not work otherwise.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid using IPython in gradio package.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid using IPython in altair package.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid using numba in pyqtgraph package.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid using triton in torch package.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid using unittest in multiprocess package.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid using setuptools with new mmcv package as well.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid URLs in numpy messages.

• Code Generation: Dedicated helper function for fixed imports, that uses less C code for standard imports.

• Standalone: Avoid including libz on Linux.

• Quality: Use latest isort and rstchk versions.

Organizational

• Python3.12: Mark as unsupported for now, it does not yet compile on the C level again.

• User Manual: Added description of deployment mode, this was not documented so far, but for some programs, dealing with them is now required.

• User Manual: Improved --include-plugin-directory documentation to make it more clear what it is usable for and what not.

• UI: Reject standard library paths for plugin directories given to --include-plugin-directory which is a frequent user error.

• UI: When interrupting during Scons build with CTRL-C do not give a Nuitka call stack, there is no point in that one, rather just exit with a message saying the user interrupted the scons build.

• UI: Make package data output from --list-package-data more understandable.

  We already had a count for DLLs too, and should not list directory name in case it’s empty and has no data files, otherwise this can confuse people.

• UI: Make the progress bar react to terminal resizes. This avoids many of the distortions seen in Visual Code that seems to do it a lot.

• UI: Added a mnemonic warning for macOS architecture cross compilation, that it will only work as well as Python does when limited to that arch. Read more on the info page for detailed information. Added in 1.8.4 already.

• UI: Error exit for wrong/non-existent input files first. Otherwise e.g. complaints about not including anything can be given where project options were intended to solve that.

• UI: Enhanced error message in case of not included imageio plugins. Added in 1.8.4 already.

• UI: Enhanced messages from options nanny, showing the condition that was not passed.

• UI: Improved download experience. When hitting CTRL-C during a download, delete the incomplete file immediately, otherwise it’s causing an error next run. Also added progress for downloads as well, so they do not sit there silent without a way to know how much is remaining.

• UI: Also report errors happening during plugin init nicely.

• Visual Code: Added ignore paths code spell checking. This only adds the most obvious things, more to come later.

• Visual Code: Use environment for C include path configurations, and add one for use on macOS, this cleaned up a lot of inconsistencies in paths for the various existing platforms.

• Debugging: Added experimental switch to disable free lists, so memory corruption issues can become easier to debug.

• UI: Output clang and gcc versions in --version output as well.

• UI: Add hint how to disable the warning message that asks to disable the console during debugging by explicit --enable-console usage.

• UI: Do not consider aliases of options for ambiguous option error. Without this --no-progressbar and --no-progress-bar being both accepted, forced long version of options for no good reason.

• Debugging: With --debug output failed query command that a plugin made. In this way it is easier to check what is wrong about it for the user already.

• UI: Check if metadata included has the actual distribution package included. Otherwise we error out, as this would result in a RuntimeError when the program is attempting to use it.

• UI: Harmonized help text quoting. We will also need that in order to generate the help texts for Nuitka-Action in the future. Currently this is not perfect yet.

• Debugging: Added trace that allows us to see how long Py_Exit call takes, which might be a while in some cases.

• User Manual: Made the Nuitka requirements top level chapter.

• User Manual: Added promise to support newer Python versions as soon as possible.

• User Manual: Added section about how Linux standalone is hard and needs special care.

• Python3.11: Disallow to switch to g++ for too old gcc, with this Python version we have to use C11.

• Quality: Remove inconsistencies with C python hex version literals in auto-format, which will also make searching code easier.

• UI: More clear error message for asking package data of a module name that is not a package.

Cleanups

• Dedicated node for fixed and built-in imports were added, which allow the general import node to be cleaner code.

• Scons: Removed remaining win_target mode, this is long obsolete.

• Spelling improvements by newer codespell, and generally, partially ported to 1.8.4 already so the Actions pass again.

• Plugins: Move python code of dill-compat run time hook to separate file.

Tests

• Run the distutils tests on macOS as well, so it’s made sure wheel creation is working there too, which it was though.

• Avoid relative URLs in use during pyproject.toml tests, these fail to work on macOS at least.

• Add GI GTK/GDK/Cairo standalone test for use with MSYS2. Eventually this should be run inside Nuitka-Watch against MSYS2 on a regular basis, but it doesn’t support this Python flavor yet.

• Added test case with Chinese module names and identifiers that exposed issues.

• Completed the PGO test case and actually verify it does what we want.

• Added standalone test for setuptools. Since our anti-bloat works makes it not compiled with most packages, when it is, make sure it doesn’t expose Nuitka to some sort of issue by explicitly covering it.

• Show tracebacks made in report creations on GitHub Actions and during RPM builds.

Summary

This is again massive in terms of new features supported. The lazy loader support is very important as it allows to handle more packages in better ways than just including everything.

The new added optimization are nice, esp. startup time will make a huge difference for many people, but mainly the focus was on supporting packages properly, and getting Nuitka-Watch to be able to detect breaking of packages from PyPI closer to when it happens.

And then of course, there is a tremendous amount of improvements for the UI, with lots features become even more rounded.

For Python 3.12 work has begun, but there is more to do for it. At this time it’s not clear how long it takes to add it. Stay tuned.

Nuitka Release 1.8

Bug Fixes

• Standalone: Added support for opentelemetry package. Added in 1.7.1 already.

• Reports: Fix, do not report plugin influence when there are not no-auto-follow in an anti-bloat section. Fixed in 1.7.2 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Add missing usage tag use_pytest for anti-bloat changes that remove pytest related codes. Fixed in 1.7.2 already.

• Standalone: Added support for newer jsonschema package. Fixed in 1.7.2 already.

• Standalone: Fix, our iterdir implementation was crashing in files for packages that don’t actually have a directory for data files to live in. Fixed in 1.7.2 already.

• Fix, parent package imports could pick the wrong name internally and then collide with sub-packages of that package during collision. Fixed in 1.7.3 already.

• Standalone: Added support for pymssql package. Fixed in 1.7.3 already.

• Standalone: Added support for cvxpy package. Fixed in 1.7.4 already.

• Standalone: Added missing dependencies of lib2to3.refactor. Fixed in 1.7.4 already.

• Standalone: Fix, data files for lib2to3.pgen were regressed. Fixed in 1.7.4 already.

• Standalone: Added missing dependency of cairo package. Fixed in 1.7.4 already.

• Standalone: Added support for new trio package. Fixed in 1.7.4 already.

• Standalone: Added support for markdown package. Fixed in 1.7.4 already.

• Standalone: Added support to eventlet package. Fixed in 1.7.4 already.

• Standalone: Added support for more newer sklearn package. Fixed in 1.7.5 already.

• Standalone: Added support for more newer skimage package. Fixed in 1.7.5 already.

• Standalone: Added support for more newer transformers package. Fixed in 1.7.5 already.

• Standalone: Added support for torch_scatter package. Fixed in 1.7.6 already.

• Standalone: Added missing DLL for wx.html2 to work well on Windows. Fixed in 1.7.6 already.

• Fix, the @pyqtSlot decoration could crash the compilation and was effective even if no pyqt plugin was active. Fixed in 1.7.6 already.

• Python3.11: Fix, need to support BaseExceptionGroup for code generation too, otherwise the exceptiongroup backport was not working. Fixed in 1.7.7 already.

• MSYS2: Fix usage of deprecated sysconfig variable with mingw. After their switch to Python 3.11, it is no longer available. Fixed in 1.7.7 already.

• Distutils: Do not compile empty directories found in package scan as namespaces. Fixed in 1.7.7 already.

• Python3.7+: Fix, need to follow dict internal structure more correctly, otherwise we over-allocate and copy more data than necessary. Fixed in 1.7.7 already.

• Python3.8: Fix, the new pyqt plugin workaround requires 3.9 or higher and could causes compile time crashes with the @pyqtSlot decorator. Fixed in 1.7.7 already.

• Modules: Fix, the .pyi file created was using default encoding which can vary and potentially even crash on other systems. Enforcing utf-8 now. Fixed in 1.7.8 already.

• Fix, only failed relative imports should become package relative. This was giving wrong names for attempts imports in these cases. Mostly only affected dependency caching correctness and reporting at this time. Fixed in 1.7.8 already.

• Standalone: Added missing metadata dependencies for transformers package. Fixed in 1.7.9 already, but more added for release.

• Fix, need to ignore folders that cannot be module names in stdlib. Could e.g. crash when encountering folders like .idea which cannot be module names. Fixed in 1.7.9 already.

• Standalone: Added data files for langchain package. Fixed in 1.7.10 already.

• Fix, forced output paths didn’t work without C11 mode. This mainly affected older MSVC users, with newer MSVC and good enough Windows SDK, it’s not using C++ anymore. Fixed in 1.7.10 already.

• Fix, was using int values for boolean returns, something that was giving warnings with at least older MSVC not in C11 mode. Fixed in 1.7.10 already.

• Fix, failed hard name imports could crash with segfault trying to release their value. Fixed in 1.7.10 already.

• Standalone: Added missing implicit dependency for xml.sax in stdlib. Fixed in 1.7.10 already.

• Windows: Fix, --mingw64 mode was not working if MSVC was installed, but not acceptable for use. Fixed in 1.7.10 already.

• Standalone: Fix, onnxruntime had too few DLLs included. Fixed in 1.7.10 already.

• Standalone: Added support for moviepy. Fixed in 1.7.10 already.

• Python3.10+: Fix, matching empty sequences was not considering length, leading to incorrect code execution for that case.

  match x:
     case []:
           ... # non-empty sequences matched here
  

• UI: Fix, some error outputs didn’t work nicely with progress bars, need to use our own print function that temporarily disables them or else outputs get corrupted.

• Linux: Sync output for data composer. This is to avoid race conditions that we might have been seeing occasionally.

• Compatibility: Fix, the sys.flags.optimize value for --python-flag=-OO didn’t match what Python does.

• Standalone: Fix, packages have no __file__ if imported from frozen, these was causing issues for some packages that scan all modules and expect those to be there.

• Fix, the dict built-in could crash if its argument self-destructs during usage.

• Fix, the PySide2/PySide6 workaround for connecting compiled class methods without crashing were not handling its optional type argument.

• Enhanced non-commercial PySide2 support by adding yet another class to be hooked. This was ironically contributed by a commercial user.

• Standalone: Added support for newer delvewheel version as used in newest scipy and probably more packages in the future.

• Compatibility: The pkgutil.iter_modules function now works without importing the module first. The makes Faker work on Windows as well.

• Reports: Detect top level packages even with broken packaging. Some packages will not reveal through installed files or top level what package they are for, and as a result, they cannot be uninstalled, but we need to still be able guess what package they are responsible for, so we go by their PyPI name, which works for tensorflow.

• Compatibility: More robust way of allowing iteration of compiled packages via file path.

  Rather than pre-populating the cache, we should provide the hook function to check if we are responsible for a given path. With this, the Faker package works on Windows as well now, and probably other packages benefit too. This then works on paths rather than strings, which due to short paths, etc. can be non-unique on Windows easily.

• Standalone: Added support for the opencc package.

• Compatibility: Fix, import name resolving done for things like six and others should be done as soon as possible, and not just during optimization, or else some imports can become just wrong as a result.

• Python3.11: Added support for the new closure keyword only argument in exec built-in.

• Standalone: Added support for pythonnet on Linux as well.

• Debian: Fix, do not give false alarms for root pip installed packages, they get a similar path component, but are not actually Debian packages of course, this was mostly affecting builds inside containers of course.

• Compatibility: Added support for comparing results from our resource reader file interfaces. This is needed for when people want to e.g. sort the the file list.

• Python3.6+: Fix, didn’t catch await on module level as a syntax error.

• Compatibility: Added support for joblib with loky backend as well.

• Standalone: Added support for newer chromadb adding missing dependencies and data files.

• Python3.9+: Fix, importlib.resources.files() was not fully compatible

  Need to provide basename for .name attribute rather than an absolute path. And in some cases, a leading trailing slashes was produced for the full path, which caused trouble for file iteration of filenames.

• Standalone: Added support for newer importlib_resources as well. We now need to expose the files functionality even before Python 3.9 for this to be possible.

• Standalone: Added support for newer rapidfuzz package.

• Added support for newer PyOpenGL package.

New Features

• Plugins: Added support to specify embedding of metadata for given packages via the package configuration. With this, entry points, version, etc. can even be resolved if not currently possible at compile time to so through the code with static optimization. Added in 1.7.1 already.

  - module-name: 'opentelemetry.propagate'
    data-files:
      include-metadata:
        - 'opentelemetry-api'
  

• Distutils: Add PEP 660 editable install support. With this pdm can be used for building wheels with Nuitka compilation. Added in 1.7.8 already.

• Haiku: Added support for accelerated mode, standalone will need more work, also recognize its form of the site-packages folder, named vendor-packages.

• Disable misleading initial import exception handling in numpy, all what it says detracts only.

• Added python flags given for no_asserts, no_docstrings and no_annotations to the __compiled__ attribute values of modules and functions to fully expose the information.

• Watch: Added capability to specify what nuitka binary to use in nuitka-watch so we can use enhanced nuitka-watch from develop branch with older versions of Nuitka with no issues.

• Watch: Now evaluates the minimum version needed for Nuitka, and skips test cases, allowing nuitka-watch to be run with versions that do not yet handle cases that e.g. develop already can, i.e. next Nuitka version.

• Watch: Now evaluates if a compilation with Nuitka needs to be done at all, as it’s only necessary if the PyPI config changed, or if Nuitka version changed.

• Reports: Added source path for modules, so it’s easier to tell where something came from, and esp. in case of bugs in the import location of Nuitka.

• Reports: In case of a crash, always write report file for use in bug reporting. This is now done even if no report was asked for.

• Reports: Include error exit message from Nuitka in case of explicit exits.

• UI: Added new --deployment and --no-deployment-flag that disables certain debugging helpers.

  Right now, we use this to control a hook that prevents execution of itself with -c which is used by e.g. joblib and that potentially can turns Nuitka created programs into a fork bombs, when they use sys.executable -c .... This can be disabled with --no-deployment-flag=self-execution or --deployment.

  The plan is to expand this to cover FileNotFoundError and similar exception exits pointing to compilation issues with helpful more annotations.

• Catch attempts to exec compiled function bytecodes.

  This segfaults otherwise with at least Python3.11 and is probably a good idea to catch for all versions, as it doesn’t do anything.

• Windows: Remove unnecessary .\ in CMD files generated, these will otherwise show up in sys.argv[0] too, making them more ugly than necessary.

• Scons: Also respect CFLAGS setting. It’s rarely used, but for completeness sake we should have that too. The effects are the same as CCFLAGS it seems.

Optimization

• Added type shape for built-in hash operation, these must indeed be of int type either way.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid using unittest in future and multiprocessing package. Added in 1.7.3 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid using unittest in git package. Added in 1.7.3 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid IPython in streamlit package.

• Standalone: Make transformers work with no_docstrings mode. Added in 1.7.7 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid more IPython usage in transformers package.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid using pytest in polyfactory package.

• Anti-Bloat: Expand the list of modules that are in the unittest group by the ones Python provides itself, test.support, test.test_support and future.moves.test.support, so the culprits are more easily recognizable.

• Anti-Bloat: Treat ipykernel and jupyter_client as equal to IPython for usage, so the bloat warning about IPython becomes more meaningful in that case too.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid using IPython in plumbum package.

• Statically optimize the value of sys.byteorder as well.

• Anti-Bloat: Added no-auto-follow for tornado in joblib package. The user is informed of that happening if nothing else imports tornado in case he wants to enable it.

• Standalone: Avoid including standard library zipapp or calendar automatically and remove their runners through anti-bloat configuration. This got rid of argparse for hello world compilation.

• Standalone: Do not auto include standard library json.tool which is a binary only.

• Standalone: Avoid automatic inclusion a _json extension module for the json module and do not automatically include it as part of stdlib anymore, this can reduce the size of standalone distributions.

• Standalone: Avoid the standard library audioop extension module by making all audio related modules non-automatically included.

• Standalone: Avoid the _contextvars standard library extension module. Explicit and implicit imports of contextvar module will continue to work and hopefully give proper errors until we do ourselves raise such errors.

• Standalone: Avoid also the “_crypt” standard library extension module, and make the crypt module raise an error where we modify the message to not be as misleading.

• Standalone: On macOS we also saw _bisect, _opcode and more modules that are optional extension modules, that we no longer do automatically use if they are that way.

• Standalone: Added more modules like mailbox, grp, etc. to exclusion from standard library when they trigger dependencies on other things, or are an extension themselves.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid using sqlalchmy.testing and therefore pytest in sqlalchemy package. Also added that testing package to be treated as using pytest. Added in 1.7.10 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid IPython in distributed package. Added in 1.7.10 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid dask usage in skimage. Added in 1.7.10 already.

• Anti-Bloat: More changes needed for newer sympy to avoid IPython. Added in 1.7.10 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Enhanced handling of PIL.ImageQt even without the Qt binding plugins being active.

• Anti-Bloat: Do not automatically follow matplotlib from scipy as that is code that will only be used if other code using it exists too.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid pandas and matplotlib for sklearn package. Availability checks of third-party packages should be counted as real usage.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid IPython in newer keras module too.

• Anti-Bloat: Updated for newer tensorflow package, also using more robust new form of no-auto-follow to achieve that.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid using Qt bindings for pandas.io.clipboard as it’s only useful if one of our Qt plugins is active.

Organizational

• User Manual: Make it clear in the example that renaming created extension modules to change their name does not work, such that the user has to first rename the Python module properly.

• macOS: Pronounce Homebrew as somewhat support but not recommended due to its limited results for portability.

• UI: Added mnemonic for unsupported Windows store Python, so we have a place to give more information. Read more on the info page for detailed information.

• UI: Disable warning for numpy/scipy DLL non-identity conflicts. These are very common unfortunately and known to be harmless.

• Stop creating PDFs for release. They are not really needed, but cause extra effort that makes no sense.

• Quality: Updated to latest black which removes some leading new lines in blocks, changing a bunch of files. Bumped development requirements file Python version to 3.8, since black won’t do 3.7 anymore.

• Quality: Updated to latest PyLint, no changes from that.

• Quality: Auto-format the markdown files used for GitHub templates as well.

• Debugging: Catch errors during data composer phase cleaner. Added in 1.7.1 already.

• Plugins: More clear error messages for Yaml files checker. Added in 1.7.5 already.

• Release: Avoid DNS lookup by container, these sometimes failed.

• UI: Catch user error of compiling in module mode with unknown file kinds, it needs to be Python code of course.

• UI: In case of SyntaxError in main file, always suggest latest supported version. Previous it was toggling between Python2 and Python3, but that’s no longer the main reason this happens.

• UI: Fix typo in help output for --trademarks option. Added in 1.7.8 already.

• UI: Fix, need to enforce version information completeness only on Windows, other platforms can be more forgiving. Added in 1.7.8 already.

• Visual Code: Enable black formatter as default for Python.

• UI: Disallow --follow-stdlib with --standalone mode. This is now the default, and just generally makes no sense anymore.

• Plugins: Warn if Qt qml plugins are not included, but qml files are. This has been a trap for first time users for a while now, that now have a way of knowing that they need to enable that Qt plugin feature.

• Plugins: Enhanced Qt binding plugins selection by the various qt plugins

  Now can also ask to not include specified plugins with --noinclude-qt-plugins and by now include sensible by default, with the --include-qt-plugins=qml line not replacing it, but rather extending it. That makes it easier to handle and catches a common trap, where users would only specify the missing plugin, but remove required plugins like platform making it stop to work.

• Plugins: Allow plugins provide None for flags not just by return value length, but also an explicit value, so plugin code can make a difference in a consistent way.

• UI: Lets have the options-nanny output the failed condition, so it’s more clear what the issue is.

• Quality: Unified spell checker markers to same form in all files through auto-format for more consistency.

• Quality: Always avoid attempting to format executables, much like we already do for bytecode, otherwise some attempts on them can crash.

• Windows: Only change directory to short path during execution of Scons, we are otherwise leaking it to --run execution in tests, giving their output comparison a harder time than necessary.

• Scons: Use report paths for outputs of filenames in slow compilation messages as well.

• WinPython: Adapted detection of this flavor to changes made in that project.

Cleanups

• Major Cleanup, do not treat technical modules special anymore

  Previously the immediate demotion of standard library to bytecode is not really needed and prevented dependency analysis. We have had plenty issues with that ever since not all stdlib modules were automatic anymore, there was a risk of missing some of them, just because this analysis was not done.

  Moved the import detection code to a dedicated module cleaning up the size of the standalone mechanics, as it also is not exclusive to it.

  Adding “reasons” to modules, different from “decision reasons” why something was allowed to be included, these give the technical reason why something is added. This is needed for anti-bloat to be able to ignore stdlib being added only for being frozen.

  Now we are correctly annotating why an extension module was included, e.g. is it technical or not, that solves a TODO we had.

  Removes a lot of code duplication for reading source and bytecode of modules and the separate handling of uncompiled modules as a category in the module registry is no more necessary.

  The detection logic for technical modules itself was apparently not robust and had bugs to be fixed that became visible now, and that make it unclear how it ever worked as well.

• Refactor towards unification of statement and expression.

  Make sure Make existing statement operations, i.e. use the function intended for them so they are immediately closer to what expressions do, and don’t visit their own children themselves anymore.

  Remove checks for expression or statement, we won’t use that anymore, and it’s only costing performance until we merge them.

• The caching (currently only used when demoting to bytecode), was not keeping track of distributions attempted to be used, but then being not found. That could have led to errors when using the cached result.

• Again some more spelling fixes in code were identified and fixed.

• Removed now unused user provided flag from uncompiled module nodes.

• Removed 3.3 support from test runner as well.

• Avoid potential slur word from one of the tests.

Tests

• Sometimes the pickle from cached CPython executions cannot be read due to protocol version differences, then of course it’s also not usable.

• Added CPython311 test suite, but it is not yet completely integrated.

• Tests: Salvage one test for dateutil from a GSoC 2019 PR, we can use that.

Summary

This is massive in terms of new features supported. The deployment mode being added, provides us with a framework to make new user experience with e.g. the missing data files, much more generous and help them by pointing to the right solution.

The technical debt of immediate bytecode demotion being removed, is huge for reliability of Nuitka. We now really only have to deal with actual hidden dependencies in stdlib, and not just ones caused by us trying to exclude parts of it and missing internal dependencies.

Nuitka Release 1.7

There release is focused on adding plenty of new features in Nuitka, with the new isolated mode for standalone being headliners, but there are beginnings for including functions as not compiled, and really a lot of new anti-bloat new features for improved handling, and improving user interaction.

Also many packages were improved specifically to use less unnecessary stuff, some of which are commonly used. For some things, e.g. avoiding tkinter, this got also down to polishing modules that have GUI plugins to avoid those if another GUI toolkit is used.

In terms of bug fixes, it’s also a lot, and macOS got again a lot of improvements that solve issues in our dependency detection. But also a long standing corruption for code generation of cell variables of contractions in loops has finally been solved.

Bug Fixes

• Python3.11: The MSVC compiler for Windows will not work before 14.3 (Visual Studio 2022) if used in conjunction with Python 3.11, point it out to the user an ignore older versions. Fixed in 1.6.1 already.

• Standalone: Added support for the pint package. Fixed in 1.6.1 already.

• Standalone: Added missing standard library dependency for statistics. Fixed in 1.6.1 already.

• Compatibility: Fix, the transformers auto models were copying invalid bytecode from compiled functions. Added workaround to use compiled function .clone() method. Fixed in 1.6.1 already.

• Compatibility: Added workaround for scipy.optimize.cobyla package. Fixed in 1.6.1 already.

• Anaconda: Detect Anaconda package from conda install vs. PyPI package from pip install, the specifics should only be applied to those. Adapted our configurations to make the difference. Fixed in 1.6.1 already.

• Anaconda: Do not search DLLs for newer shapely versions. Fixed in 1.6.1 already.

• Standalone: Add new implicit dependencies for pycrytodome.ECC module. Fixed in 1.6.1 already.

• Standalone: Fix tls_client for Linux by not non-Linux DLLs. Fixed in 1.6.1 already.

• MacOS: When using --macos-app-name, the executable name of a bundle could become wrong and prevent the launch of the program. Now uses the actual executable name. Fixed in 1.6.1 already.

• Multidist: The docs didn’t properly state the option name to use which is --main and also it didn’t show up in help output. Fixed in 1.6.2 already.

• Standalone: Added support for polars package. Fixed in 1.6.3 already.

• Standalone: Added implicit imports for apscheduler triggers. Fixed in 1.6.3 already.

• Standalone: Add data files to AXML parser packages. Added in 1.6.4 already.

• Fix, exec nodes didn’t annotate their exception exit. Fixed in 1.6.4 already.

• Standalone: Added data files for open_clip package. Fixed in 1.6.4 already.

• Standalone: Avoid data files warning with old pendulum package. Fixed in 1.6.4 already.

• Standalone: Added implicit dependencies for faker module. Fixed in 1.6.4 already.

• Added workaround for opentele exception raising trying to look at the exception frame before its raised. Fixed in 1.6.4 already.

• Nuitka-Python: Do not check for unknown built-in modules. Fixed in 1.6.4 already.

• Scons: Fix, the total ccache file number given could be wrong. Ignored messages were counted still as compiled, leading to larger sum of files than actually there was. Fixed in 1.6.5 already.

• Fix, multiprocessing resource tracker was not properly initialized. On at least macOS this was causing it to work relatively badly, because it could fail to actually use it. Fixed in 1.6.5 already.

• Standalone: Added support for cassandra-driver package. Fixed in 1.6.5 already.

• Onefile: Have Python process suicide when bootstrap surprisingly died, respecting the provided grace time for shutdown. Fixed in 1.6.5 already.

• Plugins: Fix, package versions for at least Ubuntu packages can be broken, such that at least pkg_resources rejects them. Handle that and use fallback to next version detection method. Fixed in 1.6.5 already.

• Onefile: Handle SIGTERM and SIGQUIT just like SIGINT on non-Windows. The Python code with see KeyboardInterrupt for all 3 signals, so it’s easier to implement. Previously onefile would exit without cleanup being performed. Fixed in 1.6.5 already.

• Standalone: Fix, need to add more implicit dependencies for pydantic because we do no longer include e.g. decimal and uuid automatically.

• Standalone: Added missing implicit dependencies for fiona package. Added in 1.6.6 already.

• Standalone: Added missing implicit dependencies for rasterio package. Added in 1.6.6 already.

• Standalone: Fix, need to add more implicit dependencies for pydantic. Added in 1.6.6 already.

• Fix, the data composer used a signed value for encoding constant blob sizes, limiting it needlessly to half the size possible.

• Windows: Avoid dependency on API not available on all versions, specifically Windows 7 didn’t work anymore. With this, symlinks are only resolved where they actually exist, and MinGW64 does it too now.

• Standalone: Added support for .location attribute for pkg_resources distribution objects.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid using dask and numba in the tsfresh package.

• Fix, outline cell variables must be re-initialized on entry. The code would be crashing for for outlines used in a loop, since the cleanup code for these cell variables would release the cell that was created during containing scope setup.

• Standalone: Added missing dependency of pygeos package.

• Standalone: Added sqlalchemy implicit dependency.

• Standalone: Added data files for mnemonic package.

• Fix, attribute checks could cause corruption when used on objects that raise exceptions during __getattr__.

• Python2: Fix, wasn’t making sure instance attribute lookups were actually only done with str attributes.

• macOS: Fix, need to allow versioned DLL dependency from un-versioned DLLs packaged.

• Standalone: Added DLLs for rtree package.

• Standalone: Added support for newer skimage package.

• Standalone: Added support for newer matplotlib package.

• Standalone: Fix, our numpy.testing replacement, was lacking a function assert_array_almost_equal used in at least the pytransform3d package.

New Features

• Added support for --python-flag=isolated mode. In this mode, packages are not expandable via environment variable provided paths and sys.path is emptied which makes imports from the file system not work.

• The options for forcing outputs were renamed to --force-stdout-spec and force-stderr-spec to force output to files and now work on non-Windows as well. They kind of were before, but e.g. %PROGRAM% was not implemented for all OSes yet.

• Capturing of all outputs now extends beyond the Python level outputs is now attempting to capture C level outputs as well. These can be traces of Nuitka itself, but also messages from C libraries. On Windows, with MinGW64 this does not work, and it still only captures MinGW64, due to limitations of using different C run-times. With MSVC it works for the compiled program and C, but DLLs can have their own C runtime outputs that are still not caught.

• Added new spec value %PROGRAM_BASE% which will avoid the suffix .exe or .bin of binaries that %PROGRAM% will still give.

• Plugins: Added ability to query if a package in an Anaconda package or not, with the new is_conda_package() function in Nuitka package configuration. Added in 1.6.1 already.

• Plugins: Provide control tags during plugin startup with new interface, such that these become globally visible.

• Plugins: Allow to give --include-qt-plugins options of Qt binding plugins to be given multiple times. This is for consistency with other options. These now expand the list of plugins rather than replacing it.

• Added experimental code to include functions decorated in certain ways to be included as bytecode. Prepare the inclusion as source code in a similar fashion. This was used to make example PyQt5 code work properly with timers where it doesn’t normally work, but is still in development before it will be generally useful. For that it reacts to @pyqtSlot decorators.

• Plugins: Make anti-bloat not warn when bloating modules include their group. This helps when e.g. distributed is going to use dask, then we warn about distributed, but not anymore, when that then uses dask. And that intention to avoid dask is now in the warning given for distributed.

• Plugins: Added ability to decide module inclusion based on using module name and not only the used name. This will be super useful to make some imports not count per se for inclusion.

• Plugins: Added new no-auto-follow Yaml configuration for anti-bloat, that makes imports from one module not automatically included. That can make optional import removal much easier.

• Plugins: Added new function for when clauses, such that it now can be tested if this Python version has a certain built-in name, e.g. when: 'not has_builtin_module("_socket")' will not apply configuration _socket is an extension module rather than built-in. This can be used to avoid unnecessary changes.

Optimization

• Optimization: Better hasattr handling. Added ability for generated expression base class to monitor the attribute name for becoming constant and then calling a new abstract method due to auto_compute_handling saying wait_constant:name.

• Optimization: Added type shapes for setattr and hasattr built-ins as well as the attribute check node for better code generation.

• Optimization: Added dedicated nodes for importlib.resources.files to allow including the used package automatically.

• Standalone: Include only platform DLLs for tls_client rather than all DLLs for all platforms. Added in 1.6.1 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid including sympy.testing for sympy package. Added in 1.6.3 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid IPython in transformers package. Added in 1.6.3 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid transformers.testing_util inclusion for transformers package as it will trigger pytest inclusion.

• Anti-Bloat: Added missing method to our numpy.testing stub, so it can be used with more packages. Added in 1.6.4 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid numba usage from parts of pandas. Added in 1.6.4 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid pytest usage in patsy more completely. Added in 1.6.4 already.

• Standalone: Added data files needed for pycountry package. Added in 1.6.4 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid unittest usage in numpy package. Added in 1.6.4 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid using pytest in statsmodels package. Added in 1.6.4 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid including PIL.ImageQt when no-qt plugin is used. Added in 1.6.4 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid IPython usage in dask. We do not cover bloat with dask allowed well yet, more like this should be added. Added in 1.6.5 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid dask via distributed in fsspec package. Added in 1.6.5 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid IPython in patsy package. Added in 1.6.5 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid setuptools in newer torch as well. Added in 1.6.5 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid tkinter inclusion in PIL and matplotlib if another GUI plugin is active. This is using the control tags made available by GUI plugins.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid warning for from unittest import mock imports. These are common, and not considered actual usage of unittest anymore.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid pandas usage in tqdm. This uses the new no-auto-follow feature that will enable the optional integration of tqdm if pandas is included by other means only.

• Anti-Bloat: Better method of avoiding socket in email.utils. With changing the source code to delay the import of socket to the only function using it. Socket is now included only if used elsewhere. These changes however, are only done if _socket if is not a built-in module, because only then they really matters. And using a simple --include-module=socket will restore this. This approach is more robust and less invasive.

Organizational

• Added run-inside-nuitka-container for use in CI scripts. With this, dependencies of package building and testing from correct system installation should go away.

• Release: Add CI container for use with run-inside-nuitka-container to make Debian package releases. This provides a more stable and flexible environment rather than building through ansible maintained environments, since different branches can more easily use different versions, or new features for the container handling.

• Release: Use upload tokens rather than PyPI password in uploads, and secure the account with 2FA.

• UI: Avoid duplicate warnings for anti-bloat detected imports. In case of from unittest import mock there were 2 warnings given, for unittest and unittest.mock but that is superfluous.

• macOS: More beginner friendly version of Apple Python standalone error. They won’t know why it is, and where to get a working Python version, so we explain more and added a download link.

• Scons: Consider only 5 minutes slow for a module compilation in backend. Many machines are busy or slow by nature, so don’t warn that much.

• GitHub: Actions no longer work (easily) with Python2, so we removed those and need to test it elsewhere.

• UI: Output the filename of the XML node dump from --xml as well.

• UI: Make --edit-module-code work with onefile outputs as well.

• Debugging: Allow yaml condition traceback to go through in --debug mode, so exception causes are visible.

• Plugins: Make more clear what is the forbidden module user, such that it is possible to debug it.

• UI: Inform user about slow linking, and --lto=no choice in case auto was used. This should make this option more obvious for new users that somehow victim of not defaulting to no, but still having a slow link.

• Debugging: Include PDBs for DLLs in unstripped mode already. Previously this was only done for debug mode, but that’s a bit high of a requirement, and we sometimes need to debug where things do not happen in debug mode.

• User Manual: Added typical problem with python -m compiled_module execution not working and why that is so.

• Debian: Do not include PDF files in packages. These are probably not used that much, but they cause issues at times, that are likely not worth the effort.

Cleanups

• Moved OS error reporting as done in onefile binary to common code for easier reuse in plugins.

• Moved helper codes for expanding paths and for getting the path to the running executable to file path common code for clearer code structure.

• Removed x-bits from files that do not need them. For __main__ files, they are not needed, and for some files they were outright wrong.

• Python3.12: Avoid usage of distutils.utils which were using to disable bytecode compilation for things we expect to not work.

• Solve TODO and use more modern git command git branch --show-current to detect branch, our CI will have this for sure.

• In our Yaml configuration prefer the GUI toolkit control tags, e.g. use_pyside6 over the plugin("pyside6") method.

Tests

• Release: Use CI container for linter checks, so different branches can use different versions with less pain involved.

• macOS: Allow all system library frameworks to be used, not just a few selected ones, there is many of them and they should all exist on every system. Added in 1.6.1 already.

• Made the pendulum test actually useful to cover new and old pendulum actually working properly.

Summary

This release really polished anti-bloat to the point where we now have all the tools needed. Also torch in newest version is now working nicely again with it, and a few rough edges of what we did with 1.6 for not including extension modules were removed. This polishing will go on, but has reached really high levels. More and more people are capable of helping with PRs here.

The optimization work outside of anti-bloat was really minor, with only the two attribute built-in nodes being worked on, and only hasattr seeing real improvements. However, this was more of a structural thing. The wait_constant technique will not get applied more often, but it also will need a wait_all_constant companion, before we can expect scalability improvements.

Restoring Windows 7 is important to many people deploying to old systems, and the like.

However, in the coming release, we need to attack loop tracing. The only bugs currently remaining are related to wrong tracing of items, and it also is a limitation for hard imports to work. So scalability from doing more of the wait_constant work, and from more clever loop tracing shall be the focus of the 1.8 release.

Nuitka Release 1.6

This release bumps the much awaited 3.11 support to full level. This means Nuitka is now expected to behave identical to CPython3.11 for the largest part.

There is plenty of new features in Nuitka, e.g. a new testing approach with reproducible compilation reports, support for including the metadata if an distribution, and more.

In terms of bug fixes, it’s also huge, and esp. macOS got a lot of improvements that solve issues with prominent packages in our dependency detection. And then for PySide we found a corruption issue, that got workarounds.

Bug Fixes

• The new dict in optimization was compile time crashing on code where the dictionary shaped value checked for a key was actually an conditional expression

  # Was crashing
  "value" in some_dict if condition else other_dict
  

  Fixed in 1.5.1 already.

• Standalone: Added support for openvino. This also required to make sure to keep used DLLs and their dependencies in the same folder. Before they were put on the top level. Fixed in 1.5.1 already.

• Android: Convert RPATH to RUNPATH such that standalone binaries need no LD_LIBRARY_PATH guidance anymore. Fixed in 1.5.1 already.

• Standalone: Added support for newer skimage. Fixed in 1.5.1 already.

• Standalone: Fix, new data file type .json needed to be added to the list of extensions used for the Qt plugin bindings. Fixed in 1.5.2 already.

• Standalone: Fix, the nuitka_types_patch module using during startup was released, which can have bad effects. Fixed in 1.5.2 already.

• Android: More reliable detection of the Android based Python Flavor. Fixed in 1.5.2 already.

• Standalone: Added data files for pytorch_lightning and lightning_fabric packages. Added in 1.5.2 already.

• Windows: Fix, the preservation of PATH didn’t work on systems where this could lead to encoding issues due to reading a MBCS value and writing it as a unicode string. We now read and write the environment value as unicode both. Fixed in 1.5.3 already.

• Plugins: Fix, the scons report values were not available in case of removed --remove-output deleting it before use. It is now read in case if will be used. Fixed in 1.5.3 already.

• Python3.11: Added support for ExceptionGroup built-in type. Fixed in 1.5.4 already.

• Anaconda: Fix, using numpy in a virtualenv and not from conda package was crashing. Fixed in 1.5.4 already.

• Standalone: Added support for setuptools. Due to the anti-bloat work, we didn’t notice that if that was not sufficiently usable, the compiled result was not usable. Fixed in 1.5.4 already.

• Distutils: Added support for pyproject with src folders. This supports now tool.setuptools.packages.find with a where value with pyproject files, where it typically is used like this:

  [tool.setuptools.packages.find]
  where = ["src"]
  

• Windows: Fix, the nuitka-run batch file was not working. Fixed in 1.5.4 already.

• Standalone: Add pymoo implicit dependencies. Fixed in 1.5.5 already.

• macOS: Avoid deprecated API, this should fix newer Xcode being used. Fixed in 1.5.5 already.

• Fix, the multiprocessing in spawn mode didn’t handle relative paths that become invalid after process start. Fixed in 1.5.5 already.

• Fix, spec %CACHE_DIR% was not given the correct folder on non-Windows. Fixed in 1.5.5 already.

• Fix, special float values like nan and inf didn’t properly generate code for C values. Fixed in 1.5.5 already.

• Standalone: Add missing DLL for onnxruntime on Linux too. Fixed in 1.5.5 already.

• UI: Fix, illegal python flags value could enable site mode. by mistake and were not caught. Fixed in 1.5.6 already.

• Windows: Fix, user names with spaces failed with MinGW64 during linking. Fixed in 1.5.6 already.

• Linux: Fix, was not excluding all libraries from glibc, which could cause crashes on newer systems. Fixed in 1.5.6 already.

• Windows: Fix, could still pickup SxS libraries distributed by other software when found in PATH. Fixed in 1.5.6 already.

• Windows: Fix, do not use cache DLL dependencies if one the files listed there went missing. Fixed in 1.5.6 already.

• Onefile: Reject path spec that points to a system folder. We do not want to delete those when cleaning up clearly. Added in 1.5.6 already.

• Plugins: Fix, the dill-compat was broken by code object changes. Fixed in 1.5.6 already.

• Standalone: Added workaround for networkx decorator issues. Fixed in 1.5.7 already.

• Standalone: Added workaround for PySide6 problem with disconnecting signals from methods. Fixed in 1.5.7 already.

• Standalone: Added workaround for PySide2 problem with disconnecting signals.

• Fix, need to make sure the yaml package is located absolutely or else case insensitive file systems can confuse things. Fixed in 1.5.7 already.

• Standalone: Fix, extra scan paths were not considered in caching of module imports, breaking the feature in many cases. Fixed in 1.5.7 already.

• Windows: Fix, avoid system installed appdirs package as it is frequently broken. Fixed in 1.5.7 already.

• Standalone: The bytecode cache check needs to handle re-checking relative imports found in the cache better. Otherwise some standard library modules were always recompiled due to apparent import changes. Fixed in 1.5.7 already.

• Nuitka-Python: Fix, do not insist on PYTHONHOME making it to os.environ in order to delete it again. Fixed in 1.5.7 already.

• Nuitka-Python: Allow builtin modules of all names. This is of course what it does. Fixed in 1.5.7 already.

• Nuitka-Python: Ignore empty extension module suffix. Was confusing Nuitka to consider every file an extension module potentially. Fixed in 1.5.7 already.

• Plugins: Properly merge code coming from distinct plugins. The __future__ imports need to be moved to the start. Added in 1.5.7 already.

• Standalone: Added support for opentele package. Fixed in 1.5.7 already.

• Standalone: Added support for newer pandas and pyarrow usage. Fixed in 1.5.7 already.

• Standalone: Added missing implicit dependency for PySide6. Fixed in 1.5.7 already.

• Fix, the pyi-file parser didn’t handle doc strings, and could be crash for comment contents not conforming to be import statement code. Fixed in 1.5.8 already.

• Standalone: Added support for pyqtlet2 data files.

• Python2: Fix, PermissionError doesn’t exist on that version, which could lead to issues with retries for locked files e.g. but was also observed with symlinks.

• Plugins: Recognize the error given by with upx if a file is already compressed.

• Fix, so called “fixed” imports were not properly tracking their use, such that they then didn’t show up in reports, and didn’t cause dependencies on the module, which could e.g. impact importlib to not be included even if still being used.

• Windows: Fix, retries for payload attachment were crashing when maximum number of retries were reached. Using the common code for retries solves that, since that code handles it just fine.

• Standalone: Added support for the av module.

• Distutils: Fix, should build from files in build folder rather than source files. This allows tools like versioneer that integrate with setuptools to do their thing, and get the result of that to compilation rather than the original source files.

• Standalone: Added support for the Equation module.

• Windows/macOS: Avoid problems with case insensitive file systems. The nuitka.Constants module and nuitka.constants package could collide, so we now avoid that package, there was only what is now nuitka.Serialization in there anyway. Also similar problem with nuitka.utils.Json and json standard library module.

• Standalone: Added support transformers package.

• Standalone: Fix for PyQt5 which needs a directory to exist.

• macOS: Fix, was crashing with PyQt6 in standalone mode when trying to register plugins to non-default path. We now try to skip the need, which also makes it work.

• Fix, recursion error for complex code that doesn’t happen in ast module, but during conversion of the node tree it gives to our own tree, were not handled, and crashed with RecursionError. This is now also handled, just like the error from ast.

• Standalone: Added support for sqlfluff.

• Standalone: Added support for PySide 6.5 on macOS solving DLL dependency issues.

• Scons: Recognize more ccache outputs properly, their logging changed and provided irrelevant states, and ones not associated so far.

• Onefile: Fix, could do random exit codes when failing to fork for whatever reason.

• Standalone: Added support for pysnmp package.

• Standalone: Added support for torchaudio and tensorflow on macOS. These contain broken DLL dependencies as relative paths, that are apparently ignored by macOS, so we do that too now.

• Onefile: Use actual rather than guessed standalone binary name for multiprocessing spawns. Without this, a renamed onefile binary, didn’t work.

• Fix, side effect nodes, that are typically created when an expression raises, were use in optimization contexts, where they do not work.

• Standalone: Added missing implicit dependency for sentence_transformers package.

• macOS: Fix, added missing dependency for platform module.

New Features

• Support for Python 3.11 is finally there. This took very long, because there were way more core changes than with previous releases. Nuitka integrates close to that core, and is as such very affected by this. Also a lot of missed opportunities to improve 3.7 or higher, 3.9 or higher, and 3.10 or higher were implemented right away, as they were discovered on the way. Those had core changes not yet taken advantage of and as a result got faster with Nuitka too.

• Reports: Added option --report-diffable to make the XML report created with --report become usable for comparison across different machine installations, users compiling, etc. so it can be used to compare versions of Nuitka and versions of packages being compiled for changes. Also avoid short names in reports, and resolve them back to long names, so they become more portable too.

• Reports: Added option to provide custom data from the user. We use it in out testing to record the pipenv state used with things like --report-user-provided=pipenv-lock-hash=64a5e4 with this data ending up inside of reports, where tools like the new testing tool nuitka-watch can use it to decide if upstream packages changed or not. These are free form, just needs to fit XML rules.

• Plugins: Added include-pyi-file flag to data-files section. If provided, the .pyi file belonging to a specific module is included. Some packages, e.g. skimage depend at runtime on them. For data file options and configuration, these files are excluded, but this is now the way to force their inclusion. Added in 1.5.1 already.

• Compatibility: Added support for including distribution metadata with new option --include-distribution-metadata.

  This allows generic walks over distributions and their entry points to succeed, as well as version checks with the metadata packages that are not compile time optimized.

• Distutils: Handle extension modules in build tasks. Also recognize if we built it ourselves, in which case we remove it for rebuild. Added in 1.5.7 already.

• Linux: Detect DLL like filenames that are Python extension modules, and ignore them when listing DLLs of a package with --list-package-dlls option. So far, this was a manual task to figure out actual DLLs. This will of course improve the Yaml package configuration tooling .

• Onefile: Allow forcing to use no compression for the onefile payload, useful for debugging, to avoid long compression times and for test coverage of the rare case of not compressing if the bootstrap handles that correctly too.

• Need to resolve symlinks that were used to call the application binary in some places on macOS at least. We therefore implemented the previously experimental and Windows only feature for all platforms.

• Standalone: Added support including symlinks on non-Windows in standalone distribution, if they still point to a path that is inside the distribution. This can save a bunch of disk space used for some packages that e.g. distribute DLL links on Linux.

• Onefile: Added support for including symlinks from the standalone distribution as such on non-Windows. Previously they were resolved to complete copies.

• UI: Respect code suffixes in package data patterns. With this e.g. --include-package-data=package_name:*.py is doing what you say, even if of course, that might not be working.

• UI: Added option --edit-module-code option.

  To avoid manually locating code to open it in Visual Code replaced old find-module helper to be a main Nuitka option, where it is more accessible. This also goes beyond it it, such that it resolves standalone file paths to module names to make debugging easier, and that it opens the file right away.

• Standalone: Added support for handling missing DLLs. Needed for macOS PySide6.5.0 from PyPI, which contains DLL references that are broken. With this feature, we can exclude DLLs that wouldn’t work anyway.

Optimization

• Anti-Bloat: Remove IPython usage in huggingface_hub package versions. Added in 1.5.2 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid IPython usage in tokenizers module. Added in 1.5.4 already.

• Added support for module type as a constant value. We want to add all types we have shapes for to allow better type(x) optimization. This is only the start.

• Onefile: During payload unpacking the memory mapped data was copied to an input buffer. Removing that avoids memory copying and reduces usage.

• Onefile: Avoid repeated directory creations. Without it, the bootstrap was creating already existing directories up to the root over and over, making many unnecessary file system checks. Added in 1.5.5 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Remove usage of IPython in trio package. Added in 1.5.6 already.

• Onefile: Use resource for payload on Win32 rather than overlay. This integrates better with signatures, removing the need to check for original file size. Changed in 1.5.6 already.

• Onefile: Avoid using zstd input buffer, but using the memory mapped contents directly avoiding to copy uncompressed payload data. Changed in 1.5.6 already.

• Onefile: Avoid double slashes in expanded onefile temp spec paths, they are just ugly.

• Anti-Bloat: Remove usage of pytest and IPython for some packages used by newer torch. Added in 1.5.7 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid triton to use setuptools. Added in 1.5.7 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid pytest in newer networkx package. Added in 1.5.7 already.

• Prepare optimization for more built-in types with experimental code, but we need to disable it for now as it requires more completeness in code generation to cover them all. We did some, e.g. module type, but many more will be missing still.

• Prepare optimization of class selection at compile time, by having a helper function rather than a dedicated node. This work is not complete though, and cannot be activated yet.

• Windows: Cache short path name resolutions. Esp. for reporting, we now do a lot more of these than before, and this avoids they can become too time consuming.

• Faster constant value handling for float value checks by avoiding module lookups per value.

• Minimize size for hello world distribution such that no unused extension modules are included, by excluding even more modules and using modules from automatic inclusion of standard library.

• Anti-Bloat: Catch pytest namespaces py and _pytest sooner, to point to the actual uses more directly.

• Anti-Bloat: Usage of doctest equals usage of “unittest” so cover it too, to point to the actual uses more directly.

• Ever more spelling fixes in code and tests were identified and fixed.

• Make sure side effect nodes indicate properly that they are raising, allowing exceptions to fully bubble up. This should lead to more dead code being recognized as such.

Organizational

• GitHub: Added marketplace action designed to cross platform build with Nuitka on GitHub directly. Usable with both standard and commercial Nuitka versions, and pronouncing it as officially supported.

  Check out out at Nuitka-Action repository.

• Windows: When MSVC doesn’t have WindowsSDK, just don’t use it, and proceed, to e.g. allow fallback to winlibs gcc.

• User Manual: The code to update benchmark numbers as giving was actually wrong. Fixed in 1.5.1 already.

• UI: Make it clear that partially supported versions are considered experimental, not unsupported. Fixed in 1.5.2 already.

• Plugins: Do not list deprecated plugins with plugin-list, they do not have any effect, but listing them, makes people use them still. Fixed in 1.5.4 already.

• Plugins: Make sure all plugins have descriptions. Some didn’t have any yet, and sometimes the wording was improved. Fixed in 1.5.4 already.

• UI: Accept y as a shortcut for yes in prompts. Added in 1.5.5 already.

• Reports: Make sure the DLL dependencies for Linux are in a stable order. Added in 1.5.6 already.

• Plugins: Check for latest fixes in PySide6. Added in 1.5.6 already.

• Windows XP: For Python3.4 make using Python2 scons work again, we cannot have 3.5 or higher there. Added in 1.5.6 already.

• Quality: Updated to latest PyLint. With Python 3.11 the older one, was not really working, and it was about time. Due to its many changes, we included it in the hotfix, so those can still be done. Changed in 1.5.7 already.

• Release: Avoid broken requires.txt in source distribution. This apparently breaks poetry. Changed in 1.5.7 already.

• GitHub: Enhanced issue template for more clarity, esp. to avoid unnecessary options, e.g. using --onefile for issues that show up with --standalone already, to report factory branch issues rather on Discord, and give a quick tip for a likely reproducer if a package fails to import.

• User Manual: Added instructions on how to add a DLL or executable to a standalone distribution.

• User Manual: Example paths in the table for path specs, meant for Windows were not properly escaping the backslashes and therefore rendered incorrectly.

• Visual Code: Python3.11 is now the default configuration for C code editing.

• Developer Manual: Updated descriptions for adding test suite. While added the Python 3.11 test suite, these instructions were further improved.

• Debugging: Make it easier to fully deactivate free lists. Now only need to set max size to 0 and the free list will not be used.

• Debugging: Added more assertions, added corrections to feature disables, check args after function calls for validity, check more types to be as expected.

• Plugins: Enhanced plugin error messages generally, with --debug exceptions become warning messages with the original exception being raised instead, making debugging during development much easier.

• UI: Make it clear what not using ccache actually means. Not everybody is familiar with the design of Nuitka there or what the tool can actually do.

• UI: Do not warn about not found distributions but merely inform of them.

  Since Nuitka is fully compatible with these, no need to consider those a warning, for some packages they also are given really a lot.

• UI: Catch user error of wrong cases plugin names

  This now points out the proper name rather than denying the existence outright. We do not want to accept wrong case names silently.

Cleanups

• Use proper API for setting PyConfig values during interpreter initialization. There is otherwise always the risk of crashes, should these values change during runtime. Fixed in 1.5.2 already.

• For our reformulations have a helper function that build release statements for multiple variables at once. This removed a bunch of repetitve code from re-formulations.

• Move the pyi-file parser code out of the module nodes and to source handling, where it is more closely related.

Tests

• Adding a nuitka-watch tool, which is still experimental and for use with the Nuitka-Watch repository.

• Refined macOS standalone exceptions further to cover more normal usages of files on that OS and for frameworks that applications typically use from the system.

• Detect and consider onefile mode if given in project options as well.

• Was not really applying import check in programs tests. Added in 1.5.6 already.

• Added coverage of testing the signing of Windows binaries with the commercial plugin.

• Added coverage of version information to hello world onefile test, so we can use it for Virus tools checks.

• Added tests to cover PyQt6 and PySide6 plugin availability, we so far only had that for PyQt5, which is of course not relevant, and totally different code anyway.

• Cleanup distutils tests case to use common test case scanning. We now decide version skips based on names, and had to get away from number suffixes, so they are now in the middle.

Summary

The class bodies optimization has made some progress in this release, going to a re-formulation of the metaclass selection, so as to allow its future optimization. We are not yet at “compiled objects”, but this is a promising road. We need to make some optimization improvements for inlining constant value calls, then this can become really important, but by itself these changes do not yield a lot of improvement.

For macOS again a bunch of time was spent to improve and complete the detection of DLL dependencies. More corner cases are covered now and more packages just work fine as a result.

The most important is to become Python3.11 compatible, even if attribute lookups, and other things, and not yet optimized. We will get to that in future releases. For now, compatibility is the first step to take.

For GitHub users, the Nuitka-Action will be interesting. But it’s still in develop. We keep adding missing options of Nuitka for a while it seems, but for most people it should be usable already.

The new nuitka-watch ability, should allow us to detect breaking PyPI releases, that need a new tweak in Nuitka sooner. But it will probably grow in the coming releases to full value only. For now the tool itself is not yet finished.

From here, a few open ends in the CPython 3.11 test suite will have to be addressed, and maybe some of the performance tricks that it now will enable, e.g. with repeated attribute lookups.

Nuitka Release 1.5

This release contains the long awaited 3.11 support, even if only on an experimental level. This means where 3.10 code is used, it is expected to work equally well, but the Python 3.11 specific new features have yet been done.

There is plenty of new features in Nuitka, e.g. much enhanced reports, Windows ARM native compilation support, and the usual slew of anti-bloat updates, and newly supported packages.

Bug Fixes

• Standalone: Added implicit dependencies for charset_normalizer package. Fixed in 1.4.1 already.

• Standalone: Added platform DLLs for sounddevice package. Fixed in 1.4.1 already.

• Plugins: The info from Qt bindings about other Qt bindings being suppressed for import, was spawning multiple lines, breaking tests. Merged to a single line until we do text wrap for info messages as well. Fixed in 1.4.1 already.

• Plugins: Fix removeDllDependencies was broken and could not longer be used to remove DLLs from inclusion. Fixed in 1.4.1 already.

• Fix, assigning methods of lists and calling them that way could crash at runtime. The same was true of dict methods, but had never been observed. Fixed in 1.4.2 already.

• Standalone: Added DLL dependencies for onnxruntime. Fixed in 1.4.2 already.

• Standalone: Added implicit dependencies for textual package. Fixed in 1.4.2 already.

• Fix, boolean tests of lists could be optimized to wrong result when list methods got recognized, due to not annotating the escape during that pass properly. Fixed in 1.4.3 already.

• Standalone: Added missing implicit dependency of apsw. Fixed in 1.4.3 already.

  Note

  Currently apsw only works with manual workarounds and only in limited ways, there is an import level incompatible with __init__ being an extension module, that Nuitka does not yet handle.

• Python3: Fix, for range arguments that fail to divide there difference, the code would have crashed. Fixed in 1.4.3 already.

• Standalone: Fix, added support for newer pkg_resources with another vendored package. Fixed in 1.4.4 already.

• Standalone: Fix, added support for newer shapely 2.0 versions. Fixed in 1.4.4 already.

• Plugins: Fix, some yaml package configurations with DLLs by code didn’t work anymore, notably old shapely 1.7.x versions were affected. Fixed in 1.4.4 already.

• Fix, for onefile final result the “–output-dir” option was ignored. Fixed in 1.4.4 already.

• Standalone: Added mozilla-ca package data file. Fixed in 1.4.4 already.

• Standalone: Fix, added missing implicit dependency for newer gevent. Fixed in 1.4.4 already.

• Scons: Accept an installed Python 3.11 for Scons execution as well. Fixed in 1.4.4 already.

• Python3.7: Some importlib.resource nodes asserted against use in 3.7, expecting it to be 3.8 or higher, but this interface is present in 3.7 already. Fixed in 1.4.5 already.

• Standalone: Fix, Python DLLs installed to the Windows system folder were not included, causing the result to be not portable. Fixed in 1.4.5 already.

• Python3.9+: Fix, metadata.resources files method joinpath is some contexts is expected to accept variable number of arguments. Fixed in 1.4.5 already.

• Standalone: Workaround for customtkinter data files on non-Windows. Fixed in 1.4.5 already.

• Standalone: Added support for overrides package. Fixed in 1.4.6 already.

• Standalone: Added data files for strawberry package. Fixed in 1.4.7 already.

• Fix, anti-bloat plugin caused crashes when attempting to warn about packages coming from --include-package by the user. Fixed in 1.4.7 already.

• Windows: Fix, main program filenames with an extra dot apart from the .py suffix, had the part beyond that wrongly trimmed. Fixed in 1.4.7 already.

• Fix, list methods didn’t properly annotated value escape during their optimization, which could lead to wrong optimization for boolean tests. Fixed in 1.4.7 already.

• Standalone: Added support for imagej, scyjava, jpype packages. Fixed in 1.4.8 already.

• Fix, using --include-package on extension module names was not working. Fixed in 1.4.8 already.

• Standalone: Added support for tensorflow.keras namespace as well.

• Distutils: Fix namespace packages were not including their contained modules properly with regards to __file__ properties, making relative file access impossible.

• Onefile: On Windows the onefile binary did lock itself, which could fail with certain types of AV software. This is now avoided.

• Accessing files using the top level metadata.resources files object was not working properly, this is now supported too.

• MSYS2: Make sure mixing POSIX and Windows slashes causes no issues by hard-coding the onefile archive to use the subsystem slash rather than what MSYS prefers to use internally.

• Standalone: Added missing dependencies of newer imageio.

• Fix, side effect nodes didn’t annotate their non-exception raising nature properly, if that was the case.

New Features

• Added experimental support for Python 3.11, for 3.10 language level code it should be fully usable, but the CPython311 test suite has not even been started to check newly added or changed features.

• Windows: Support for native Python on Windows ARM64, which needs 3.11 or higher, but standalone and therefore onefile do not yet work, due to lack of any form of binary dependency analysis tool.

  This platform is relatively new in Python and generally. For the time being standalone and onefile should be done with Intel based Python, they would also be ARM64 only, whereas 32/64 Bit binaries can be run on all Windows ARM platforms.

• Reports: Write compilation report even in case of Nuitka being interrupted or crashing. This then includes the exception, and a status like completed or interrupted. At this time this happens only when --report= was specified, but in the future we will likely write one in case of Nuitka crashes.

• Reports: Now the details of the used Python version, its flavor, the OS and the architecture are included. This is crucial information for analysis and can make --version output unnecessary.

• Reports: License reports now handle UNKNOWN license by falling back to checking the classifiers, and therefore include the correct license e.g. with setuptools. Also in case no license text is found, do not create an empty block. Added in 1.4.4 already.

• Reports: In case the distribution name and the contained package names differ, output the list of packages included from a distribution. Added in 1.4.4 already.

• Reports: Include data file sizes in report. Added in 1.4.7 already.

• Reports: Include memory usage into the compilation report as well.

• macOS: Add support for downloading ccache on arm64 (M1/M2) too. Added in 1.4.4 already.

• UI: Allow --output-filename for standalone mode again. Added in 1.4.3 already.

• Standalone: Improved isolation with Python 3.8 or higher. Using new init mechanisms of Python, we now achieve that the scan for pyvenv.cfg on in current directory and above is not done, using it will be unwanted.

• Python2: Expose __loader__ for modules and register with pkg_resources too which expects these to be present for custom resource handling.

• Python3.9+: The metadata.resources files objects method iterdir was not implemented yet. Fixed in 1.4.5 already.

• Python3.9+: The metadata.resources files objects method absolute was not implemented yet.

• Added experimental ability to create virtualenv from an existing compilation report with new --create-environment-from-report option. It attempts to create a requirements file with the used packages and their versions. However, sometimes it seems not to be possible to due to conflicts.

Optimization

• Onefile: Use memory mapping for calculating the checksum of files on all platforms. This is faster and simpler code. So far it had only be done this way on Windows, but other platforms also benefit a lot from it.

• Onefile: Use memory mapping for accessing the payload rather than file operations. This avoids differences to macOS payload handling and is much faster too.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid using dask in joblib.

  Note

  Newer versions of joblib do not currently work yet due to their own form of multiprocessing spawn not being supported yet.

• Anti-Bloat: Adapt for newer pandas package.

• Anti-Bloat: Remove more IPython usages in newer tensorflow.

• Use dedicated class bodies for Python2 and Python3, with the former has a static dict type shape, and with Python3 this needs to be traced in order to tell what the meta class put in there.

• Compile time optimize dict in/not in and dict.has_key operations statically where the keys of a dict are known. As a result, the class declarations of Python3 no longer created code for both branches, the one with metaclass = in the class declaration and without. That means also a big scalability improvement.

• For the Python3 class bodies, the usage of locals() was not recognized as not locally escaping all the variables, leading to variable traces where each class variable was marked as escaped for no good reason.

• Added support for dict.fromkeys method, making the code generation understand and handle static methods as well.

• Added support for os.listdir and os.path.basename. Added in 1.4.5 already for use in implementing the iterdir method, but they are also now optimized by themselves.

• Added support for trusted constant values of the os module. These are curdir, pardir, sep, extsep, altsep, pathsep, linesep which may enable some minor compile time optimization to happen and completes this aspect of the os module.

• Faster digit size checks during float code generation for better compile time performance.

• Faster list operations due to using PyList_CheckExact everywhere this is applicable, this mostly makes debug operations faster, but also deep copying list values, or extending lists with iterables, etc.

• Optimization: Collect module usages of the given module during its abstract execution. This avoids a full tree visit afterwards only to find them. It is much cheaper to collect them while we go over the tree. This enhances the scalability of large compilations by ca. 5%.

• Optimization: Faster determination of loop variables. Rather than using a generic visitor, we use the children having generator codes to add traversal code that emits relevant variables to the user directly.

• Cache extra search paths in order to avoid repeated directory operations as these are known to be slow at times.

• Standalone: Do not include py.typed data files, these indicator files are for IDEs, but not needed at run time ever.

• Make sure that the generic attribute code optimization is also effective in cases where a Python DLL is used. Previously this was only guaranteed to be used with static libpython.

• Faster list constant usage

  Small immutable constants get their own code that is much faster for small sizes.

  Medium sized lists get code that just is hinted the size, but takes items from a source list, still a lot faster.

  For repeated lists where all elements are the same, we use a dedicated helper for all sizes, that is even faster except for small ones with LTO enabled, where the C compiler may already do that effectively.

• Added optimization for os.path.abspath and os.path.isabs which of course have not as much potential for compile time optimization, but we needed them for providing .absolute() for the meta path loader files implementation.

• Faster class dictionary propagation decision. Instead of checking for trace types, let the trace object decide. Also abort immediately on first inhibit, rather than checking all variables. This improves Python2 compile time, and Python3 where this code is now starting to get used when the class dictionary is shown to have dict type.

• Specialize type method __prepare__ which is used in the Python3 re-formation of class bodies to initialize the class dictionary. Where the metaclass is resolved, we can use this to decide that the standard empty dictionary is used statically, enabling class dictionary propagation for best scalability.

  At this time this only happens with classes without bases, but we expect to soon do this with all compile time known base classes. At this time, these optimization to become effective, we need to optimize meta class selection from bases classes, as well as modification of base classes with __mro_entries__ methods.

• The bool built-in on boolean values is now optimized away.

  Since it’s used also for conditions being extracted, this is actually somewhat relevant, since it could keep code alive in side effects at least for no good reason and this allows a proper reduction.

Organizational

• Project: Require the useful stuff for installation of Nuitka already. These are things we cannot inline really, but otherwise will frequently be warned about, e.g. zstandard for onefile and ordered-set for fast operation, but we do not require packages that might fail to install.

• User Manual: Added section about virus scanners and how to avoid false reports.

• User Manual: Enhanced description for plugin module loading, the old code was too complicated and actually working only for a mode of including plugin code that is discouraged.

• User Manual: Fix section for standalone finding files on wrong level.

• Windows: Using the console on Python 3.4 to 3.7 is not working very well with e.g. many Asian systems. Nuitka fails to setup the encoding for stdin and stdout or this platform. It can then produce exceptions on input or output of unicode data, that doesn’t overlap with UTF-8.

  We now inform the user of these older Python with a warning and mnemonic, to either disable the console or to upgrade to Python 3.8 or higher, which normally won’t be much of an issue for most users.

  Read more on the info page for detailed information. Added in 1.4.1 already.

• Debugging: Fixup debugging reference count output with Python3.4. For Python 3.11 compatibility tests, actually it was useful to compare with a version that doesn’t have coroutines yet. Never tell me, supporting old versions is not good.

• Deprecating support for Python 3.3, there is no apparent use of this version, and it has gained specific bugs, that are indeed not worth our time. Python 2.6 and Python 2.7 will continue to be supported probably indefinitely.

• Recommend ordered-set for Python 3.7 to 3.9 as well, as not only for 3.10+ because on Windows, to install orderset MSVC needs to be installed, whereas ordered-set has a wheel for ready use.

• Actually zstandard requirement is for a minimal version, added that to the requirement files.

• Debugging: Lets not reexecute Nuitka in case if we are debugging it from Visual Code.

• Debugging: Include the .pdb files in Windows standalone mode for proper C tracebacks should that be necessary.

• UI: Detect the GitHub flavor of Python as well.

• Quality: Check the clang-format version to avoid older ones with bugs that made it switch whitespace for one file. Using the one from Visual Code C extension is a good idea, since it will often be available. Running the checks on newer Ubuntu GitHub Actions runner to have the correct version available.

• Quality: Updated the version of rstfmt and isort to the latest versions.

• GitHub: Added commented out section for enabling ssh login, which we occasionally need to git bisect problems specific to GitHub Python flavor.

• Plugins: Report problematic plugin name with module name or DLL name when these raise exceptions.

• Use ordered-set package for Python3.7+ rather than only Python3.10+ because it doesn’t need any build dependency on Windows.

• UI: When showing source changes, also display the module name with the changed code.

• UI: Use function intended for user query when asking about downloads too.

• UI: Do not report usage of ccache for linking from newer version, that is not relevant.

• Onefile: Make sure we have proper error codes when reporting IO errors.

• MSVC: Detect a version for developer prompts too. This version is needed for use in enabling version specific features.

• Started UML diagrams with plantuml that will need to be completed before using them in then new and more visual parts of Nuitka documentation.

• UI: Check icon conversion capability at start of compilation rather than error exiting at the very end informing the user about required imageio packages to convert to native icons.

• Quality: Enhanced autoformat on Windows, which was susceptible to tools introducing Windows new lines before other steps were performed, that then could be confused, also enforcing use of UTF-8 encoding when working with Nuitka source code for formatting.

Cleanups

• The delvewheel plugin was still using a zmq class name from its original implementation, adapted that.

• Use common template for generator frames as well. This made them also work with 3.11, by avoiding duplication.

• Applied code formatting to many more files in tests, etc.

• Removed a few micro benchmarks that are instead to be covered by construct-based tests now.

• Enhanced code generation for specialized in-place operations to avoid unused code for operations that do not have any shortcuts where the operation would be actual in-place of a reference count 1 object.

• Better code generation for module variable in-place operations with proper indentation and no repeated calls.

• Plugins: Use the namedtuple factory that we created for informational tuples from plugins as well.

• Make details of download utils module more accessible for better reuse.

• Remove last remaining Python 3.2 version check in C code, for us this is just Python3 with 3.2 being unsupported.

• Cleanup, name generated call helper file properly, indicating that it is a generated file.

Tests

• Made the CPython3.10 test suite largely executable with Python 3.11 and running that with CI now.

• Allow measuring constructs without writing the code diff again. Was crashing when no filename was given.

• Make Python3.11 test execution recognized by generally accepting partially supported versions to execute the tests with.

• Handle also newfstat directory checks in file usage scan. This are used on newer Linux systems.

• GitHub: In actions use --report for coverage and upload the reports as artifacts.

• Use no-qt plugin to avoid warnings in matplotlib test rather than disabling the warnings about Qt bindings.

• macOS: Detect if the machine can take runtime traces, which on Apple Silicon by default it cannot.

• macOS: Cover all APIs for file tracing, rather than just one for extended coverage.

• Fix, distutils test was not installing the built wheels, but source archive and therefore compiling that second time.

• For the pyproject.toml using tests, Nuitka was always downloaded from PyPI rather than using the version under test.

• Ignore ld info output about mismatching architecture libraries being ignored. Fixed in 1.4.1 already.

Summary

With this release an important new avenue for scalability has been started. While for Python2 class bodies were very often reduced to just that dictionary creation, with Python3 that was not the case, due to the many new complexities, and while this release makes a start, we will be able to continue this path towards much more scalable class creation codes. And while the performance does not really matter all that much for these, knowing these, will ultimately lead us to “compiled classes” as our own type, and “compiled objects” that may well perform much faster.

Already now, the enhancements to class creation codes will result in smaller binaries, but much more is expected the more this is completed.

The majority of the work was of course to become Python3.11 compatible, and unfortunately the attribute lookups are not as optimized as for 3.10 yet, which may cause disappointing results for performance initially. We will need to complete that before benchmarks will make much sense.

For the next release, full Python 3.11 support is planned. I believe it should be usable. Problems with 3.11 may get hotfixes, but ultimately the develop version is probably the one to recommend when using 3.11 with Nuitka, as there will be the whole set of fixes, since not everything will be ported back.

The new reports should be used in bug reporting soon. We foresee that for issue reports, these may well become mandatory. Together with the ability to create a virtualenv from the reports, this may make reproducing issues a breeze, but first tries on complex projects were also highlighting that it may not be as simple.

Nuitka Release 1.4

This release contains a large amount of performance work, where specifically Python versions 3.7 or higher see regressions in relative performance to CPython fixed. Many cases of macros turned to functions have been found and resolved. For 3.10 specifically we take advantage of new opportunities for optimization. And generally avoiding DLL calls will benefit execution times on platform where the Python DLL is used, most prominently Windows.

Then this also adds new features, specifically custom reports. Also tools to aid with adding Nuitka Package Configuration input data, to list DLLs and data files.

With multidist we see a brand new ability to combine several programs into one, that will become very useful for packaging multiple binaries without the overhead of multiple distributions.

Bug Fixes

• Standalone: Added implicit dependencies for dependency_injector package. Fixed in 1.3.1 already.

• Fix, the generated metadata nodes for distribution queries had an error in their generated children handling that could cause crashes at compile time. Fixed in 1.3.2 already.

• Standalone: Added implicit dependencies for passlib.apache package. Fixed in 1.3.2 already.

• Windows: Fix, our shortcut to find DLLs by analyzing loaded DLLs stumbled in a case of a DLL loaded into the compiling Python that had no filename associated, while strange, we need to handle this as well. Fixed in 1.3.3 already.

• Standalone: Also need to workaround more decorator tricks for networkx. Fixed in 1.3.3 already.

• Scons: Fix, was not updating PATH environment variable anymore, which could lead to externally provided compilers and internal winlibs gcc clashing on Windows, but should be a general problem. Fixed in 1.3.4 already.

• Standalone: Added support for cefpython3 package. Fixed in 1.3.4 already.

• Standalone: Added support for newer webview package versions. Fixed in 1.3.4 already.

• Standalone: Fix, some extension modules set their __file__ to None during multi phase imports, which we then didn’t update anymore, however that is necessary. Fixed in 1.3.4 already.

• Python3.10+: Fix, was not supporting match cases where an alternative had no condition associated. Fixed in 1.3.5 already.

• Windows: Identify Windows ARM architecture Python properly. We do not yet support it, but we should report it properly and some package configurations are already taking it already into account. Fixed in 1.3.5 already.

• Fix, the Nuitka meta path based loader, needs to expose a __module__ attribute because there is code out there, that identifies standard loaders through looking at this value, but crashes without it. Fixed in 1.3.5 already.

• Fix, very old versions of the importlib_metadata backport were using themselves to load their __version__ attribute. Added a workaround for it, since in Nuitka it doesn’t work until after loading the module.

• Fix, value escapes for attribute and subscript assignments sources were not properly annotated. This could cause incorrect code execution. Fixed in 1.3.6 already.

• Fix, “pure” functions, which are currently only our complex call helper functions, were not visited in all cases. This lead to a crash in code generation after modules using them got demoted to bytecode. After use from cache, this didn’t happen again. Fixed in 1.3.6 already.

• Standalone: Added more implicit dependencies of crypto packages. Fixed in 1.3.6 already.

• Standalone: Added implicit dependencies of pygments.styles module. Fixed in 1.3.6 already.

• Fix, was falsely encoding Ellipsis too soon during tree building. It is not quite like True and False. Fixed in 1.3.6 already.

• Standalone: Fix, numpy on macOS didn’t work inside an application bundle anymore. Fixed in 1.3.7 already.

• Python3.8+: Fix, need to follow change for extension module handling, otherwise some uses of os.add_dll_directory fail to work. Fixed in 1.3.8 already.

• Standalone: Added missing implicit dependencies of sqlalchemy. Fixed in 1.3.8 already.

• Python3.9+: Fix, resource reader files was not fully compatible and needed to register with importlib.resources.as_file to work well with it. Fixed in 1.3.8 already.

• Fix, the version check for cv2 was not working with the opencv-python-headless variant. Package name and distribution name is not a 1:1 mapping for all things. Fixed in 1.3.8 already.

• Standalone: Added DLLs needed for tls_client package.

• Fix, imports of resolved names should be modified for runtime too. Where Nuitka recognizes aliases, as e.g. the requests module does, it only adding a dependency on the resolved name, but not requests itself. The import however was still done at runtime on requests which then didn’t work. This was only visible if only these aliases to other modules were used.

• Onefile: Fix, do not send duplicate CTRL-C to child process. Our test only send it to the bootstrap process, rather than the process group, as it normally is working, therefore misleading us into sending it to the child even if not needed.

• Onefile: When not using cached mode, on Windows the temporary folder used sometimes failed to delete after the executable stopped with CTRL-C. This is due to races in releasing of locks and process termination and AV tools, so we now retry for some time, to make sure it is always deleted.

• Standalone: Fix, was not ignoring .dylib when scanning for data files unlike all other DLL suffixes.

• Standalone: Added missing implicit dependency of mplcairo.

• Standalone: The main binary name on non-Windows didn’t have a suffix .bin unlike in accelerated mode. However, this didn’t work well for packages which have binaries colliding with the package name. Therefore now the suffix is added in this case too.

• macOS: Workaround bug in platform_utils.paths. It is guessing the wrong path for included data files with Nuitka.

• Standalone: Added DLLs of sound_lib, selecting by OS and architecture.

• Fix, for package metadata as from importlib.metadata.metadata for use at runtime we need to use both package name and distribution name to create it, or else it failed to work. Packages like opencv-python-headless can now with this too.

• Standalone: Added support for tkinterweb on Windows. Other platforms will need work to be done later.

New Features

• UI: Added new option to listing package data files. This is for use with analyzing standalone issues. And will output all files that are data files for a given package name.

  python -m nuitka --list-package-data=tkinterweb
  

• UI: Added new option to listing package DLL files. This is also for use with analyzing standalone issues.

  python -m nuitka --list-package-dlls=tkinterweb
  

• Reports: The usages of modules, successful or not, are now included in the compilation report. Checking out which ones are not-found might help recognition of issues.

• Multidist: You can now experimentally create binaries with multiple entry points. At runtime one of multiple __main__ will be executed. The option to use is multiple --main=some_main.py arguments. If then the binary name is changed, on execution you get a different variant being executed.

  Note

  Using it with only one replaces the previous use of the positional argument given and is not using multidist at all.

  Note

  Multidist is compatible with onefile, standalone, and mere acceleration. It cannot be used for module mode obviously.

  For deployment this can solve duplication.

  Note

  For wheels, we will probably change those with multiple entry points to compiling multidist executables, so we do avoid Python script entry points there. But this has not yet been done.

• Onefile: Kill non-cooperating child processes on CTRL-C after a grace period, that can be controlled at compile time with --onefile-child-grace-time the hard way. This avoids hangs of processes that fail to properly shutdown.

• Plugins: Add support for extra global search paths to mimic sys.path manipulations in the Yaml configuration with new global-sys-path import hack.

• Reports: Include used distributions of compiled packages and their versions.

• Reports: Added ability to generate custom reports with --report-template where the user can provide a Jinja2 template to make his own reports.

• Anti-Bloat: Added support for checking python flags. There are no_asserts, no_docstrings and no_annotations now. These can be used to limit rules to be only applied when these optional modes are active.

  Not all packages will work in these modes, but often can be enhanced to work with relatively little patching. This allows to limit these patches to only where they are necessary.

Optimization

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid using sparse and through that Numba in the scipy package, reducing its distribution footprint. Part of 1.3.3 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid IPython and Numba in trimesh package. Part of 1.3.3 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid Numba in shap package. Part of 1.3.8 already.

• Anti-bloat: Removed xgboost docstring dependencies, such that --python-flag=no_docstrings can be used with this package.

• For guided deep copy frozenset and empty tuple need no copies

  This also speeds up copies of non-empty tuples by avoiding that size checking branch in construction with Python 3.10 or higher.

• For node construction, avoid keyword argument style calls of the base class, where there is only a single argument. They don’t really help readability, but cost compile time.

• Determine guard mode of frames dynamically and avoid frame preservation checks where they are not needed.

  For Python2 this is necessary, but not for Python3, so make the function avoid finding the parent frame for that version entirely, which should speed up compilation as well.

  By not hard coding frame guard mode at creation time, and instead determine it at compile time, after optimization, so this now allows to use the “once” mode more often. This affects contractions and also classes on the module level right now. They do not need a cached frame, since their code is only executed once.

  By avoiding that useless code, the C compiler also has a slightly better scalability, since the classes are all created in one function that then has less code.

• The bytecode cache is now checking if the used modules or attempted to be used modules are available or not in just the same way. Previously it was very dependent on the file system to contain the same things, which was not giving cache hits even after only creating a new folder near a binary, since that affected importable modules. With the new check it should be much more directly hitting even across different virtual environments, but with same code.

• Generate base classes or mixins for all kinds of expression, statements and statement sequences. The previous code had a dedicated variant for single child, to allow faster operation in a common case, but still a lot of hasattr/getattr/setattr on dynamic attribute names were done. This was making the tree traversal during optimization slower than necessary.

  Another shortcoming was that for some nodes, some values are optional, where for others, they are not. Some values are a tuple actually, while most are nodes only. However, dealing with this generically was also slower than necessary.

  The new code now enforces children types during creation and updated, it rejects unexpected None values for non-optional children, and it provides generated code to do this in the fastest way possible, although surely some more improvements will come here.

  Also when abstract executing the tree, rather than generically visiting all children, this now just unrolls this, and there are even some modes added, where a node can indicate properties, e.g. auto_compute_handling = "final,no_raise" will tell the code generator that this expression never raises in the computation, and is final, i.e. doesn’t have any code to evaluate, because it cannot be optimized any further.

  Also the way checkers previously worked, for every node creation, for every child update, a dictionary lookup had to be done. This is now hard coded for the few nodes that actually want to convert values on the fly and we might make a difference in the future for optional checkers, such that these are only run in debug mode.

  These changes brought about much faster compilation, however the big elephant in the room will still be merging value traces, and scalability problems remain there.

• Attribute node generation for method specs like dict.update, etc. now provide type shapes. From these type shapes, mixins for the result value type are picked automatically. Previously these shapes were added manually. In some cases, they were even missing. In a few cases, where the type is dependent on the Python version, we do not currently do this though, so this needs more work, but expanding the coverage got easier in this way.

• Determining the used modules of a module requires a tree visit operations, that then asked for node types and used different APIs. This has been unified to be able to call a virtual method instead, which saves some compile time.

• After scanning for a module, we then determined the module kind even after we previously knew it during the scan. Also, this was checking os.path.isdir which was making it relatively slow and wasting 5% compile time on the IO being done. The check got enhanced and most often replaced with using the knowledge from the original import scan eliminating this time.

• Already most helper code of Nuitka was included from .c files, but compiled generators and compiled cells codes were not yet done like this, making life unnecessarily harder for the compiler and linker. This should also allow more optimization for some codes.

• Cache the plugin decisions about recursion for a module name. When a module is imported multiple times plugins were each asked again and again, which is not a good thing to do.

• Avoid usage of PyObject_RichCompareBool API, as we have our own comparison functions that are faster and faster to call without crossing of DLL barrier.

• Python3.8+: Avoid usage of PyIndex_Check which has become an API in 3.8, and was as a result not inlined anymore with a DLL barrier was to be crossed, making all kinds of multiplication and subscript/index operations slower.

• Replace PyNumber_Index API with our own code. As of 3.10 it enforces a conversion to long that for Nuitka is not a good thing to do in all places. But also due to DLL barrier it was potentially slow to call, and is used a lot, and we can drop the checks that are useless for Nuitka.

• Python3.7+: Avoid the use of PyImport_GetModule for looking up imported modules from sys.modules, rather look it up from interpreter internals, also this was using subscript functions, when this is always a dictionary.

• Avoid using PyImport_GetModuleDict and instead have our own API to get this quicker.

• Faster exception match checks and sub type checks.

  This solves a TODO about inlining the API function used, so we can be faster in a relatively common operation. For every exception handler, we had to do one API call there.

• Faster subtype checks.

  These are common in binary operations on non-identical types, but also needed for the exception checks, and object creation through class type calls. With our own PyType_IsSubType replacement these faster to use and avoid the API call.

• Faster Python3 int value startup initialization.

  On Python 3.9 or higher we can get small int values directly from the interpreter, and with 3.11 they are accessible as global values.

  Also we no longer de-duplicate small int values through our cache, since there is no use in this, saving a bunch of startup time. And we can create the values with our own API replacement, that will work during startup already and save API calls as these can be relatively slow. And esp. for the small values, this benefits from not having to create them.

• Faster Python3 bytes value startup initialization.

  On Python 3.10 or higher, we can create these values ourselves without an API call, avoiding its overhead.

  Also we no longer de-duplicate small bytes values through our cache, because that is already done by the API and our replacement, so this was just wasting time.

• Faster slice object values with Python 3.10 or higher

  On Python 3.10 or higher, we can create these values ourselves without an API call, avoiding its overhead.

  These are important for Python3, because a[x:y] in the general case has to use a[slice(x,y)] on that version, making this somewhat relevant to performance in some cases.

• Faster str built-in with API calls

  For common cases, this avoids API calls. We mostly have this such that print style tests do not have this as API calls where we strive to remove all API calls for given programs.

• Faster exception normalization.

  For the common case, we have our own variant of PyErr_NormalizeException that will avoid the API call. It may still call the PyObject_IsSubclass API, for which we only have started replacement work, but this is already a step ahead in the right direction.

• Faster object releases

  For Python3.8 or higher when our code released objects, it was doing that with an API call, due to a macro change in Python headers. We revert that and do it still on our own which avoids the performance penalty.

• Enable Python threading during extension module DLL loading

  We now release the GIL for Python3.8 or higher when loading the DLL, following a change in that version.

• Faster variable handling in trace collection. The code was doing checks for variable types, to decide what to do e.g. when control flow escapes for a variable. However, this is faster if solved with a virtual method in those variable classes, shifting the responsibility to inside there.

• For call codes the need to check the return value was not perfectly annotated in all cases. This is now driven by the expression rather than passed, and will result in better code generated in some corner cases.

Organizational

• Release: Make clear we require wheel and setuptools to install by adding a pyproject.toml that addresses a warning of pip. Part of 1.3.6 release already.

• Debugging: When plugins evaluate when conditions that raise, output which it was exactly. Part of 1.3.3 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Added a mnemonic and more clear message for the case of unwanted imports being encountered. Also do not warn about IPython itself using IPython packages, that must of course be considered normal. Now it also lists the module that does the unwanted usage immediately. Previously this was not as clear.

• UI: More clear output for not yet supported Python version. Make it more clear in the message, what is the highest supported version, and what version is Nuitka and what is Python in this.

• UI: Make sure data files have normalized paths. Specifically on Windows, otherwise a mix of slashes could appear. Part of 1.3.6 release already.

• UI: Make it clear that disabling the console harms your debugging when we suggest the --disable-console for GUI packages. Otherwise using that, they just deprive themselves of ways to get error information.

• UI: The ordering of scons ccache report was not enforced. Part of 1.3.7 release already.

• Quality: Use proper temporary filename during autoformat, so as to avoid flicker in Visual Code, e.g. search results.

• User Manual: Was still using old option name for --onefile-tempdir-spec that has since been made not OS specific, with even the OS specific name being removed.

• Standalone: Do not include data files scanned with site-packages or __pycache__ folders. This should make it easier to use --include-data-file=./**.qml:. when you have a virtualenv living in the same folder.

• Onefile: Added check for compression ability before starting the compilation to inform the user immediately.

• Release: Mark macOS as supported in PyPI categories. This is of course true for a long time already.

• Release: Mark Android as supported in PyPI categories as well. With some extra work, it can be used.

• User Manual: Added section pointing to and explaining compilation reports. This has become extremely useful even if still somewhat work in progress.

• User Manual: Added table with included custom reports, at this time only the license reports, which is very rough shape and needs contributors for good looks and content.

Cleanups

• Plugins: Moved parts of the pywebview plugin that pertain to the DLLs and data files to package configuration.

• Made the user query code a dedicated function, so it can be reused and more consistent across its uses in Nuitka. With a default that is proposed to a user, and a default that applies if used non-interactively. We will switch all prompts to using this.

• Code generation for module, class and function frames is now unified, removing duplication while also becoming more flexible. For generators this work has been started, but is not yet completed.

• Nodes exposing used modules now implement the same virtual method providing a list of them.

• Make sure to pass tuple values rather than list values from the tree building stage and node optimization creating new nodes. This allows us to drop conversions previously done inside of nodes.

Tests

• Do not enable deprecated plugins, the warnings about them break tests.

• Ignore Qt binding warnings in tests, some are less supported than PySide6 or commercial PySide2.

Summary

The focus of this release was first a major restructuring of how children are handled in the node tree. The generated code opens up the possibility of many more scalability improvements in the coming releases. The pure iteration speed for the node tree will make compile times for the Python part even shorter in coming releases. Scalability will be a continuous focus for some releases.

Then the avoiding of API calls is a huge benefit for many platforms that are otherwise at a disadvantage. This is also only started. We will aim at getting more complex programs to do next to none of these, so far only some tests are working after program start without them, which is of course big progress. We will progress there with future releases as well.

Catching up on problems that previous migrations have not discovered is also a huge step forward to restoring the performance supremacy, that was not there anymore in extreme cases.

The Yaml package configuration work is showing its fruits. More people have been able to contribute changes for anti-bloat or missing dependencies than ever before.

Some part of the Python 3.11 work have positively influenced things, e.g. with the frame cleanup. THe focus of the next release cycle shall be to add support for it. Right now, generator frames need a cleanup to be finished, to also become better and working with 3.11 at the same time. Where possible, work to support 3.11 was also conducted as a cleanup action, or reduction of the technical debts.

All in all, it is fair to say that this release is a big leap forward in all kinds of ways.

Nuitka Release 1.3

This release contains a large amount of performance work, that should specifically be useful on Windows, but also generally. A bit of scalability work has been applied, and as usual many bug fixes and small improvements, many of which have been in hotfixes.

Bug Fixes

• macOS: Framework build of PySide6 were not properly supporting the use of WebEngine. This requires including frameworks and resources in new ways, and actually some duplication of files, making the bundle big, but this seems to be unavoidable to keep the signature intact.

• Standalone: Added workaround for dotenv. Do not insist on compiled package directories that may not be there in case of no data files. Fixed in 1.2.1 already.

• Python3.8+: Fix, the ctypes.CDLL node attributes the winmode argument to Python2, which is wrong, it was actually added with 3.8. Fixed in 1.2.1 already.

• Windows: Attempt to detect corrupt object file in MSVC linking. These might be produced by cl.exe crashes or clcache bugs. When these are reported by the linker, it now suggests to use the --clean-cache=ccache which will remove it, otherwise there would be no way to cure it. Added in 1.2.1 already.

• Standalone: Added data files for folium package. Added in 1.2.1 already.

• Standalone: Added data files for branca package. Added in 1.2.1 already.

• Fix, some forms try that had exiting finally branches were tracing values only assigned in the try block incorrectly. Fixed in 1.2.2 already.

• Alpine: Fix, Also include libstdc++ for Alpine to not use the system one which is required by its other binaries, much like we already do for Anaconda. Fixed in 1.2.2 already.

• Standalone: Added support for latest pytorch. One of our workarounds no longer applies. Fixed in 1.2.2 already.

• Standalone: Added support for webcam on Windows with opencv-python. Fixed in 1.2.3 already.

• Standalone: Added support for pytorch_lightning, it was not finding metadata for rich package. Fixed in 1.2.4 already.

  For the release we found that pytorch_lightning may not find rich installed. Need to guard version() checks in our package configuration.

• Standalone: Added data files for dash package. Fixed in 1.2.4 already.

• Windows: Retry replace clcache entry after a delay, this works around Virus scanners giving access denied while they are checking the file. Naturally you ought to disable those for your build space, but new users often don’t have this. Fixed in 1.2.4 already.

• Standalone: Added support for scipy 1.9.2 changes. Fixed in 1.2.4 already.

• Catch corrupt object file outputs from gcc as well and suggest to clean cache as well. This has been observed to happen at least on Windows and should help resolve the ccache situation there.

• Windows: In case clcache fails to acquire the global lock, simply ignore that. This happens sporadically and barely is a real locking issue, since that would require two compilations at the same time and for that it largely works.

• Compatibility: Classes should have the f_locals set to the actual mapping used in their frame. This makes Nuitka usable with the multidispatch package which tries to find methods there while the class is building.

• Anaconda: Fix, newer Anaconda versions have TCL and Tk in new places, breaking the tk-inter automatic detection. This was fixed in 1.2.6 already.

• Windows 7: Fix, onefile was not working anymore, a new API usage was not done in a compatible fashion. Fixed in 1.2.6 already.

• Standalone: Added data files for lark package. Fixed in 1.2.6 already.

• Fix, pkgutil.iter_modules without arguments was given wrong compiled package names. Fixed in 1.2.6 already.

• Standalone: Added support for newer clr DLLs changes. Fixed in 1.2.7 already.

• Standalone: Added workarounds for tensorflow.compat namespace not being available. Fixed in 1.2.7 already.

• Standalone: Added support for tkextrafont. Fixed in 1.2.7 already.

• Python3: Fix, locals dict test code testing if a variable was present in a mapping could leak references. Fixed in 1.2.7 already.

• Standalone: Added support for timm package. Fixed in 1.2.7 already.

• Plugins: Add tls to list of sensible plugins. This enables at least pyqt6 plugin to do networking with SSL encryption.

• Standalone: Added implicit dependencies of sklearn.cluster.

• FreeBSD: Fix, fcopyfile is no longer available on newest OS version, and include files for sendfile have changed.

• MSYS2: Add back support for MSYS Posix variant. Now onefile works there too.

• Fix, when picking up data files from command line and plugins, different exclusions were applied. This has been unified to get better coverage for avoiding to include DLLs and the like as data files. DLLs are not data files and must be dealt with differently after all.

New Features

• UI: Added new option for cache disabling --disable-cache that accepts all and cache names like ccache, bytecode and on Windows, dll-dependencies with selective values.

  Note

  The clcache is implied in ccache for simplicity.

• UI: With the same values as --disable-cache Nuitka may now also be called with --clean-cache in a compilation or without a filename argument, and then it will erase those caches current data before making a compilation.

• macOS: Added --macos-app-mode option for application bundles that should run in the background (background) or are only a UI element (ui-element).

• Plugins: In the Nuitka Package Configuration files, the when allows now to check if a plugin is active. This allowed us to limit console warnings to only packages whose plugin was activated.

• Plugins: Can now mark a plugin as a GUI toolkit responsible with the consequence that other toolkit detector plugins are all disabled, so when using tk-inter no longer will you be asked about PySide6 plugin, as that is not what you are using apparently.

• Plugins: Generalized the GUI toolkit detection to include tk-inter as well, so it will now point out that wx and the Qt bindings should be removed for best results, if they are included in the compilation.

• Plugins: Added ability to provide data files for macOS Resources folder of application bundles.

• macOS: Fix, Qt WebEngine was not working for framework using Python builds, like the ones from PyPI. This adds support for both PySide2 and PySide6 to distribute those as well.

• MSYS2: When asking a CPython installation to compress from the POSIX Python, it crashed on the main filename being not the same.

• Scons: Fix, need to preserve environment attached modes when switching to winlibs gcc on Windows. This was observed with MSYS2, but might have effects in other cases too.

Optimization

• Python3.10+: When creating dictionaries, lists, and tuples, we use the newly exposed dictionary free list. This can speedup code that repeatedly allocates and releases dictionaries by a lot.

• Python3.6+: Added fast path to dictionary copy. Compact dictionaries have their keys and values copied directly. This is inspired by a Python3.10 change, but it is applicable to older Python as well, and so we did.

• Python3.9+: Faster compiled object creation, esp. on Python platforms that use a DLLs for libpython, which is a given on Windows. This makes up for core changes that went unnoticed so far and should regain relative speedups to standard Python.

• Python3.10+: Faster float operations, we use the newly exposed float free list. This can speed up all kinds of float operations that are not doable in-place by a lot.

• Python3.8+: On Windows, faster object tracking is now available, this previously had to go through a DLL call, that is now removed in this way as it was for non-Windows only so far.

• Python3.7+: On non-Windows, faster object tracking is now used, this was regressed when adding support for this version, becoming equally bad as all of Windows at the time. However, we now managed to restore it.

• Optimization: Faster deep copy of mutable tuples and list constants, these were already faster, but e.g. went up from 137% gain factor to 201% on Python3.10 as a result. We now use guided a deep copy, which then has the information, what types it is going to copy, removing the need to check through a dictionary.

• Optimization: Also have own allocator function for fixed size objects. This accelerates allocation of compiled cells, dictionaries, some iterators, and lists objects.

• More efficient code for object initialization, avoiding one DLL calls to set up our compiled objects.

• Have our own PyObject_Size variant, that will be slightly faster and avoids DLL usage for len and size hints, e.g. in container creations.

• Avoid using non-optimal malloc related macros and functions of Python, and instead of the fasted form generally. This avoids Python DLL calls that on Windows can be particularly slow.

• Scalability: Generated child mixins are now used for the generated package metadata hard import nodes calls, and for all instances of single child tuple containers. These are more efficient for creation and traversal of the tree, directly improving the Python compile time.

• Scalability: Slightly more efficient compile time constant property detections. For frozenset there was not need to check for hashable values, and some branches could be replaced with e.g. defining our own EllipsisType for use in short paths.

• Windows: When using MSVC and LTO, the linking stage was done with only one thread, we now use the proper options to use all cores. This is controlled by --jobs much like C compilation already is. For large programs this will give big savings in overall execution time. Added in 1.2.7 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Remove the use of pytest for dash package compilation.

• Anti-Bloat: Remove the use of IPython for dotenv, pyvista, python_utils, and trimesh package compilation.

• Anti-Bloat: Remove IPython usage in rdkit improving compile time for standalone by a lot. Fixed in 1.2.7 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid keras testing framework when using that package.

Organizational

• Plugins: The numpy plugin functionality was moved to Nuitka package configuration, and as a result, the plugin is now deprecated and devoid of functionality. On non-Windows, this removes unused duplications of the numpy.core DLLs.

• User Manual: Added information about macOS entitlements and Windows console. These features are supported very well by Nuitka, but needed documentation.

• UI: Remove alternative options from --help output. These are there often only for historic reasons, e.g. when an option was renamed. They should not bother users reading them.

• Plugins: Expose the mnemonics option to plugin warnings function, and use it for pyside2 and pyqt5 plugins.

• Quality: Detect trailing/leading spaces in Nuitka package configuration description values during their automatic check.

• UI: Detect the CPython official flavor on Windows by comparing to registry paths and consider real prefixes, when being used in virtualenv more often, e.g. when checking for CPython on Apple.

• UI: Enhanced --version output to include the C compiler selection. It is doing that respecting your other options, e.g. --clang, etc. so it will be helpful in debugging setup issues.

  UI: Some error messages were using %r rather than '%s' to output file paths, but that escaped backslashes on Windows, making them look worse, so we changed away from this.

• UI: Document more clearly what --output-dir actually controls.

• macOS: Added options hint that the Foundation module requires bundle mode to be usable.

• UI: Allow using both --follow-imports and --nofollow-imports on command line rather than erroring out. Simply use what was given last, this allows overriding what was given in project options tests should the need arise.

• Reports: Include plugin reasons for pre and post load modules provided. This solves a TODO and makes it easier to debug plugins.

• UI: Handle --include-package-data before compilation, removing the ability to use pattern. This makes it easier to recognize mistakes without a long compilation and plugins can know them this way too.

• GitHub: Migration workflows to using newer actions for Python and checkout. Also use newer Ubuntu LTS for Linux test runner.

• UI: Catch user error of running Nuitka with the pythonw binary on Windows.

• UI: Make it clear that MSYS2 defaults to --mingw64 mode. It had been like this, but the --help output didn’t say so.

• GitHub: Updated contribution guidelines for better readability.

• GitHub: Use organisation URLs everywhere, some were still pointing to the personal rather than the organisation one. While these are redirected, it is not good to have them like this.

• Mastodon: Added link to https://fosstodon.org/@kayhayen to the PyPI package and User Manual.

Cleanups

• Nodes for hard import calls of package meta data now have their base classes fully automatically created, replacing what was previously manual code. This aims at making them more consistent and easier to add.

• When adding the new Scons file for C compiler version output, more values that are needed for both onefile and backend compilation were moved to centralized code, simplifying these somewhat again.

• Remove unused main_module tag. It cannot happen that a module name matches, and still thinks of itself as __main__ during compilation, so that idea was unnecessary.

• Generate the dictionary copy variants from template code rather than having manual duplications. For dict.copy(), for deep copy (needed e.g. when there are escaping mutable keyword argument constant values in say a function call), and for **kw value preparation in the called function (checking argument types), we have had diverged copies, that are now unified in a single Jinja2 template for optimization.

• Plugins: Also allow providing generators for providing extra DLLs much like we already do for data files.

• Naming of basic tests now makes sure to use a Test suffix, so in Visual Code selector they are more distinct from Nuitka code modules.

• Rather than populating empty dictionaries, helper code now uses factory functions to create them, passing keys and values, and allowing values to be optional, removing noisy if branches at call side.

• Removed remaining PyDev annotations, we don’t need those anymore for a long time already.

• Cleanup, avoid lists objects for ctypes defined functions and their arglist, actually tuples are sufficient and naturally better to use.

• Spelling cleanups were resumed, as an ongoing action.

Tests

• Added construct test that demonstrates the mutable constant argument passing for lists to see the performance gains in this area too.

• Made construct runner --diff output usable for interactive usage.

• Repaired Nuitka Speedcenter, but it’s not yet too usable for general consumption. More work will be needed there, esp. to make comparisons more accessible for the general public.

Summary

The major achievement of this release was the removal of the long lived numpy plug-in, replacing it with package based configuration, that is even more optimal and works perfectly across all platforms on both important package installation flavors.

This release has a lot of consolidation efforts, but also as a result of 3.11 investigations, addresses a lot of issues, that have crept in over time with Python3 releases since 3.7, each time, something had not been noticed. There will more need for investigation of relative performance losses, but this should address the most crucial ones, and also takes advantage of optimization that had become with 3.10 already.

There is also some initial results from cleanups with the composite node tree structure, and how it is managed. Generated “child(ren) having” mixins, allow for faster traversal of the node tree.

Some technical things also improved in Scons. Using multiple cores in LTO with MSVC with help this a lot, although for big compilations --lto=no probably has to be recommended still.

More anti-bloat work on more packages rounds up the work.

For macOS specifically, the WebEngine support is crucial to some users, and the new --macos-app-mode with more GUI friendly default resolves long standing problems in this area.

And for MSYS2 and FreeBSD, support has been re-activated, so now 4 OSes work extremely well (others too likely), and on those, most Python flavors work well.

The performance and scalability improvements are going to be crucial. It’s a pity that 3.11 is not yet supported, but we will be getting there.

Nuitka Release 1.2

This release contains a large amount of new compatibility features and a few new optimization, while again consolidating what we have. Scalability should be better in many cases.

Bug Fixes

• Standalone: Added implicit dependency of thinc backend. Fixed in 1.1.1 already.

• Python3.10: Fix, match statements with unnamed star matches could give incorrect results. Fixed in 1.1.1 already.

  match x:
     case [*_, y]:
           ... # y had wrong value here.
  

• Python3.9+: Fix, file reader objects must convert to str objects. Fixed in 1.1.1 already.

  # This was the `repr` rather than a path value, but it must be usable
  # like that too.
  str(importlib.resources.files("package_name").joinpath("lala"))
  

• Standalone: Added data file of echopype package. Fixed in 1.1.1 already.

• Anti-Bloat: Remove non-sense warning of compiled pyscf. Fixed in 1.1.1 already.

• macOS: Fix, in LTO mode using incbin can fail, switch to source mode for constants resources. Fixed in 1.1.2 already.

• Standalone: Add support for sv_ttk module. Fixed in 1.1.2 already.

• macOS: Fix, was no longer correcting libpython path, this was a regression preventing CPython for creating properly portable binary. Fixed in 1.1.2 already.

• macOS: Fix, main binary was not included in signing command. Fixed in 1.1.3 already.

• Standalone: Added implicit dependency of orjson. Due to zoneinfo not being automatically included anymore, this was having a segfault. Fixed in 1.1.3 already.

• Standalone: Added support for new shapely. Fixed in 1.1.4 already.

• macOS: Ignore extension module of non-matching architecture. Some wheels contain extension modules for only x86_64 arch, and others contain them only for arm64, preventing the standalone build. Fixed in 1.1.4 already.

• Standalone: Added missing sklearn dependencies. Fixed in 1.1.4 already.

• Fix, packages available through relative import paths could be confused with the same ones imported by absolute paths. This should be very hard to trigger, by normal users, but was seen during development. Fixed in 1.1.4 already.

• Standalone: Apply import hacks for pywin32 modules only on Windows, otherwise it can break e.g. macOS compilation. Fixed in 1.1.4 already.

• Windows: More robust DLL dependency caching, otherwise e.g. a Windows update can break things. Also consider plugin contribution, and Nuitka version, to be absolutely sure, much like we already do for bytecode caching. Fixed in 1.1.4 already.

• Standalone: Fix, seaborn needs the same workaround as scipy for corruption with MSVC. Fixed in 1.1.4 already.

• UI: Fix, the options-nanny was no longer functional and therefore failed to warn about non working options and package usages. Fixed in 1.1.5 already.

• macOS: Do not use extension modules of non-matching architecture. Fixed in 1.1.5 already.

• Windows: Fix, resolving symlinks could fail for spaces in paths. Fixed in 1.1.6 already.

• Standalone: Added missing DLL for lightgbm module. Fixed in 1.1.6 already.

• Compatibility: Respect super module variable. It is now possible to have a module level change of super but still get compatible behavior with Nuitka. Fixed in 1.1.6 already.

• Compatibility: Make sure we respect super overloads in the builtin module. Fixed in 1.1.6 already.

• Fix, the anti-bloat replacement code for numpy.testing was missing a required function. Fixed in 1.1.6 already.

• Fix, importlib.import_module static optimization was mishandling a module name of . with a package name given. Fixed in 1.1.6 already.

• macOS: Fix, some extension modules use wrong suffixes in self references, we need to not complain about this kind of error. Fixed in 1.1.6 already.

• Fix, do not make ctypes.wintypes a hard import on non-Windows. Nuitka asserted against it failing, where some code handles it failing on non-Windows platforms. Fixed in 1.1.6 already.

• Standalone: Added data files for vedo package. Fixed in 1.1.7 already.

• Plugins: Fix, the gi plugin did always set GI_TYPELIB_PATH even if already present from user code. Also it did not handle errors to detect its value during compile time. Fixed in 1.1.7 already.

• Standalone: Added missing dependencies for sqlalchemy to have all SQL backends working. Fixed in 1.1.7 already.

• Added support Nixpkgs’s default non-writable HOME directory. Fixed in 1.1.8 already.

• Fix, distribution metadata name and package name need not align, need to preserve the original looked up name from importlib.metadata.distribution call. Fixed in 1.1.8 already.

• Windows: Fix, catch usage of unsupported CLCACHE_MEMCACHED mode with MSVC compilation. It is just unsupported.

• Windows: Fix, file version was spoiled from product version if it was the only version given.

• Windows: The default for file description in version information was not as intended.

• Plugins: Workaround for PyQt5 as contained in Anaconda providing wrong paths from the build machine.

• macOS: After signing a binary with a certificate, compiling the next one was crashing on a warning about initially creating an ad-hoc binary.

• Fix, detect case of non-writable cache path, make explaining error exit rather than crashing attempting to write to the cache.

• macOS: Added support for pyobjc in version 9.0 or higher.

New Features

• Python3.11: For now prevent the execution with 3.11 and give a warning to the user for a not yet supported version. This can be overridden with --experimental=python311 but at this times will not compile anything yet due to required and at this time missing core changes.

• macOS: Added option --macos-sign-notarization that signs with runtime signature, but requires a developer certificate from Apple. As its name implies, this is for use with notarization for their App store.

• DLLs used via delvewheel were so far only handled in the zmq plugin, but this has been generalized to cover any package using it. With that, e.g. shapely just works. This probably helps many other packages as well.

• Added __compiled__ and __compiled_constant__ attributes to compiled functions.

  With this, it can be decided per function what it is and bridges like pyobjc can use it to create better code on their side for constant value returning functions.

• Added support_info check to Nuitka package format. Make it clear that pyobjc is only supported after 9.0 by erroring out if it has a too low version. It will not work at all before that version added support in upstream. Also using this to make it clear that opencv-python is best supported in version 4.6 or higher. It seems e.g. that video capture is not working with 4.5 at this time.

• Added --report-template which can be used to provide Jinja2 templates to create custom reports, and refer to built-in reports, at this time e.g. a license reports.

Optimization

• Trust the absence of a few selected hard modules and convert those to static raises of import errors.

• For conditional nodes where only one branch exits, and the other does not, no merging of the trace collection should happen. This should enhance the scalability and leads to more static optimization being done after these kinds of branches on variables assigned in such branches.

  if condition1:
     a = 1
  else:
     raise KeyError
  
  if condition2:
     b = 1
  
  # Here, "a" is known to be assigned, but before it was only "maybe"
  # assigned, like "b" would have to be since, the branch may or may
  # not have been taken.
  

• Do not merge tried blocks that are aborting with an exception handler that is not aborting. This is very similar to the change for conditional statements, again there is a control flow branch, that may have to be merged with an optional part, but sometimes that part is not optional from the perspective of the code following.

  try:
     ... # potentially raising, but not aborting code
     return something() # this aborts
  except Exception:
     a = 1
  
  try:
     ... # potentially raising, but not aborting code
  except Exception:
     b = 1
  
  # Here, "a" is known to be assigned, but before it was only "maybe"
  # assigned, like "b" would have to be since, the branch may or may
  # not have been taken.
  

• Exception matches were annotating a control flow escape and an exception exit, even when it is known that no error is possible to be happening that comparison.

  try:
     ...
  except ImportError: # an exception match is done here, that cannot raise
     ...
  

• Trust importlib.metadata.PackageNotFoundError to exist, with this some more metadata usages are statically optimized. Added in 1.1.4 already.

• Handle constant values from trusted imports as trusted values. So far, trusted import values were on equal footing to regular variables, which on the module level could mean that no optimization was done, due to control flow escapes happening.

  # Known to be False at compile time.
  from typing import TYPE_CHECKING
  ...
  
  if TYPE_CHECKING:
     from something import normally_unused_unless_type_checking
  

  In this code example above, the static optimization was not done because the value may be changed on the outside. However, for trusted constants, this is no longer assumed to be happening. So far only if typing.TYPE_CHECKING: using code had been optimized.

• macOS: Use sections for main binary constants binary blob rather than C source code (which we started in a recent hotfix due to LTO issues with incbin) and onefile payload. The latter enables notarization of the onefile binary as well and makes it faster to unpack as well.

• Windows: Do not include DLLs from SxS. For PyPI packages these are generally unused, and self compiled modules won’t be SxS installations either. We can add it back where it turns out needed. This avoids including comctl32 and similar DLLs, which ought to come from the OS, and might impede backward compatibility only.

• Disabled C compilation of very large azure modules.

• The per module usage information of other modules was only updated in first pass was used in later passes. But since they can get optimized away, we have to update every time, avoiding to still include unused modules.

• Anti-Bloat: Fight the use of dask in xarray and pint, adding a mode controlling its use. This is however still incomplete and needs more work.

• Fix, the anti-bloat configuration for rich.pretty introduced a SyntaxError that went unnoticed. In the future compilation will abort when this happens.

• Standalone: Added support for including DLLs of llvmlite.binding package.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid using pywin32 through pkg_resources import. This seems rather pointless and follows an optimization done for the inline copy of Nuitka already, the ctypes code path works just fine, and this may well be the only reason why pywin32 is included, which is by itself relatively large.

• Cache directory contents when scanning for modules. The sys.path and package directories were listed over and over, wasting time during the import analysis.

• Optimization: Was not caching not found modules, but retrying every time for each usage, potentially wasting time during import analysis.

• Anti-Bloat: Initial work to avoid pytest in patsy, it is however incomplete.

Organizational

• User Manual: Explain how to create 64/32 bits binaries on Windows, with there being no option to control it, this can otherwise be a bit unobvious that you have to just use the matching Python binary.

• UI: Added an example for a cached onefile temporary location spec to the help output of --onefile-tempdir-spec to make cached more easy to achieve in the proper way.

• UI: Quote command line options with space in value better, no need to quote an affected command line option in its entirety, and it looks strange.

• macOS: Catch user error of disabling the console without using the bundle mode, as it otherwise it has no effect.

• macOS: Warn about not providing an icon with disabled console, otherwise the dock icon is empty, which just looks bad.

• Debian: Also need to depend on glob2 packages which the yaml engine expects to use when searching for DLLs.

• Debian: Pertain inline copies of modules in very old builds, there is e.g. no glob2 for older releases, but only recent Debian releases need very pure packages, our backport doesn’t have to do it right.

• macOS: More reliable detection of Homebrew based Python. Rather than checking file system via its sitecustomize contents. The environment variables are only present to some usages.

• Installations with pip did not include all license, README files, etc. which however was intended. Also the attempt to disable bytecode compilation for some inline copies was not effective yet.

• Renamed pyzmq plugin to delvewheel as it is now absolutely generic and covers all uses of said packaging technique.

• Caching: Use cache directory for cached downloads, rather than application directory, which is just wrong. This will cause all previously cached downloads to become unused and repeated.

• Quality: Updated development requirements to latest black, isort, yamllint, and tqdm.

• Visual Code: Added recommendation for extension for Debian packaging files.

• Added warning for PyQt5 usage, since its support is very incomplete. Made the PyQt6 warning more concrete. It seems only Qt threading does not work, which is of course still significant. Instead PySide2 and PySide6 are recommended.

• UI: Have dedicated options group for onefile, the spec for the temporary files is not a Windows option at all anymore. Also move the warnings group to the end, people need to see the inclusion related group first.

• User Manual: Explain how to create 64/32 bits binaries on Windows, which is not too obvious.

Cleanups

• Moved PySide plugins DLL search extra paths to the Yaml configuration. In this way it is not dependent on the plugin being active, avoiding cryptic errors on macOS when they are not found.

• Plugins: Avoid duplicate link libraries due to casing. We are now normalizing the link library names, which avoids e.g. Shell32 and shell32 to be in the result.

• Cleanups to prepare a PyLint update that so otherwise failed due to encountered issues.

• Plugins: Pass so called build definitions for generically. Rather than having dedicated code for each, and plugins can now provide them and pass their index to the scons builds.

• Onefile: Moved file handling code to common code reducing code duplication and heavily cleaning up the bootstrap code generally.

• Onefile: The CRC32 checksum code was duplicated between constants blob and onefile, and has moved to shared code, with an actual interface to take the checksum.

• Spelling cleanups resumed, e.g. this time more clearly distinguishing between run time and runtime, the first is when the program executes, but the latter can be an environment provided by a C compiler.

Tests

• Tests: Added test that applies anti-bloat configuration to all found modules.

• Tests: Tests: Avoid including unused nuitka.tools code in reflected test, which should make it faster. The compiler itself doesn’t use that code.

Summary

This release is again mainly a consolidation of previous release, as well as finishing off existing features. Optimization added in previous releases should have all regressions fixed now, again with a strong series of hotfixes.

New optimization was focused around findings with static optimization not being done, but still resulting in general improvements. Letting static optimization drive the effort is still paying off.

Scalability has seen improvements through some of the optimization, this time a lot less anti-bloat work has been done, and some things are only started. The focus will clearly now shift to making this a community effort. Expect postings that document the Yaml format we use.

For macOS specifically, with the sections work, onefile should launch faster, should be more compatible with signing, and can now be used in notarization, so for that platform, things are more round.

For Windows, a few issues with version information and onefile have been addressed. We should be able to use memory mapped view on this platform too, for faster unpacking of the payload, since it doesn’t have to go through the file anymore.

Nuitka Release 1.1

This release contains a large amount of new compatibility features, while consolidating what we have. Scalability should be better in some cases.

Bug Fixes

• Standalone: Enhanced dependency scan of dependent DLLs to forward the containing package, so it can be searched in as well. This fixed at least PySide on macOS. Fixed in 1.0.1 already.

• macOS: Enhanced dependency detection to use normalized paths and therefore to be more stable. Fixed in 1.0.1 already.

• Standalone: Added support for the networkx package which uses new support for a function decorator trying to copy function default values. Fixed in 1.0.1 already.

• Standalone: Include data files for pandas.io.format package. This one has Jinja2 template files that will be needed when using this package.

• Python3.10: Fix, could crash in case a class was not giving match arguments, but the user did attempt to match them. This happened e.g. with range objects. Fixed in 1.0.2 already.

• Standalone: Added data files needed for pyenchant package. Fixed in 1.0.2 already.

• Python3.10: Fix, matching sequence with as assignments in them didn’t check for sub-pattern given. Fixed in 1.0.2 already.

• Standalone: Fix, do not attempt to list non-existent PATH entries on Windows, these can crash the dependency detection otherwise. Fixed in 1.0.2 already.

• Standalone: Fix, on newer Linux, linux-vdso.so.1 appears in output of ldd in a way that suggests it may exist, which of course it does not, this is a kernel virtual DLL. Fixed in 1.0.3 already.

• Fix, comparison expressions could give wrong results as a regression of the new release. Fixed in 1.0.3 already.

• Fix, on older Python (before 3.6), it could crash on data files defined in the Yaml config. Fixed in 1.0.4 already.

• Fix, binary operations could give wrong results as a regression of the new release. Fixed in 1.0.4 already.

• Standalone: Added support for pyzbar package. Fixed in 1.0.5 already.

• Standalone: Fix, empty directory structures were not working anymore due to a regression in the last release. Fixed in 1.0.5 already.

• Windows: Fix, detected Pythons from Windows registry may of course fail to execute, because they were e.g. manually deleted. This would show e.g. in onefile compression. Fixed in 1.0.5 already.

• Onefile: Fix, using a too old zstandard without finding another Python with a suitable one, lead to run time unpacking errors. Fixed in 1.0.6 already.

• Fix, the inline copy of Jinja2 imported logging for no good reason, which lead to errors for users who have a module of the same name, that it was then using instead. Fixed in 1.0.6 already.

• Fix, disable LTO mode for Anaconda Python, it is known to not work. Fixed in 1.0.6 already.

• Linux: Fix, no need to insist on icon path for onefile anymore. Fixed in 1.0.6 already.

• Standalone: Fix, the new version certifi was not working on Windows and 3.10 anymore. Fixed in 1.0.7 already.

• Standalone: Added support for more rapidfuzz implicit dependencies. Fixed in 1.0.8 already.

• Standalone: Added support for vibora. Fixed in 1.0.8 already.

• Fix, must not expose module name objects to Python import hooks. Fixed in 1.0.8 already.

• Fix, calls to bound methods of string values generated incorrect calls. Fixed in 1.0.8 already.

• Fix, do not crash in version detection on gcc error exit querying of its version.

• Standalone: Added back support for older versions of the pyzmq package.

• Standalone: Ignore PATH elements that fail to be listed as a directory. It appears e.g. on Windows, folders can exist, despite being unusable in fact. These can then cause errors in DLL dependency scan. Also avoid having PATH set when executing dependency walker, it appears to use it even if not asked to.

• Standalone: Added support for tzlocal package.

• Python3.10: Fix, complex literals were not working for mappings in match statements.

• Fix, bool built-in expressions were not properly annotating exception raises, where the value cannot raise on truth check.

• Standalone: Added support for the agscheduler package. Plugins must be done manually still with explicit --include-module calls.

• Standalone: Added support for using shapely in Anaconda as well.

• Debian: Fix, versioned dependency for libzstd should also be in package, this should restore Nuitka package builds for Debian Jessie.

• Standalone: Added support for vtk package.

• Windows: Fix, avoid using pywin32 in our appdirs usage, it might be a broken installation and is optional to appdirs anyway, which then will fallback to using ctypes to make the lookups.

• Standalone: Added support for more pandas versions.

• Standalone: Adding support for mkl implicit DLL usage in Anaconda.

• Standalone: Added support for jsonschema with Python 3.10.

• Standalone: Added support for pyfiglet fonts data files.

• Scons: Avoid gcc linker command line length limits for module mode too.

• Standalone: Added data file of distributed.config.

• Standalone: Add support for cv2 GUI on Linux, the Qt platform plugin is now included.

• Fix, the anti-bloat configuration for numpy.testing tools exposed an incomplete suppress_warnings replacement that could lead to errors in some functions of numpy.

• Standalone: Fix DLL dependency caching on Windows, need to consider DLL content of course too.

• Standalone: Added missing dependency for torchvision.

• Standalone: Added support for torchvision on Anaconda as well.

• Standalone: Added support for panda3d.

• Windows: Fix, need to make sure to use UTF-8 encoding for define values like company name. Otherwise the local system encoding is used, but the C compiler expects UTF-8 in wide literals. This may crash of give wrong results.

• Standalone: Added facenet_torch data files.

• Anaconda: Include libstdc++.so on Linux or else e.g. cv2 will not work with system library.

• Windows: Fix, can have file version without a company name.

New Features

• Python3.10: Added support for assignments in match alternatives | syntax.

• Compatibility: Register Nuitka meta path based loader with pkg_resources such that checking resource presence with has_resource works too. This should also add support for using jinja2.PackageLoader, previously only jinja2.FileSystemLoader worked. Fixed in 1.0.1 already.

• Compatibility: Make function __defaults__ attribute size changeable. For a long time, this was a relatively big issue for some packages, but now this is supported as well.

• Compatibility: Added support for importlib.metadata.distribution and importlib_metadata.distribution functions as well importlib.metadata.metadata and importlib_metadata.metadata functions.

• Onefile: Added support for including other binaries than the main executable in the payload. So far on non-Windows, we only made the main binary executable, hard coded, and nothing else. But Some things, e.g. Qt web engine, do require binaries to be used, and these no longer have the issue of missing x-bit on macOS and Linux now.

• Standalone: Resolve executable path when called through symbolic link, which makes file resolutions work properly for it, for this type of installing it in %PATH%.

• Python3.9+: Added support for importlib.resources.files with compiled modules.

  It returns traversable objects, which can be used to opens files, checks them, etc. and this e.g. allows jsonschema to work with Python 3.10, despite bugs in CPython’s compatibility layer.

• UI: Added interface method to specify filename patterns with package data inclusion option, making --include-package-data usable in many more cases, picking the only files or file types you want. You can now use --include-package-data=package_name=*.txt and select only a subset of package data files in this way. Before this, it included everything and --noinclude-data-files would have to be used.

• macOS: Make runtime signing an experimental option.

• Consistently allow when conditions for all package configuration elements, e.g. also DLLs.

• Plugins: Added method to overload to work on standalone binary specifically. This makes it easier to only modify that specific binary.

• Plugins: Added support for regular expressions in anti-bloat replacements, with new replacements_re code.

Optimization

• Add support for os.path hard module imports along with specialized nodes for file tests os.path.exists, os.path.isfile, and os.path.isdir aiming at tracking used files, producing warnings about missing files in the future.

• Standalone: Do not include concurrent standard library package automatically. This avoids the inclusion of multiprocessing which we essentially had reverted during last release cycle.

• Standalone: Do not include zoneinfo standard library package automatically. It has many data files and is often not used (yet).

• Standalone: Do not include asyncio standard library package automatically anymore.

• Avoid compilation of large generated codes in the asyncua package.

• Compile time optimize pkg_resources.iter_entry_points too, such that these can be used to resolve plugin modules, which helps with adding support for agscheduler package plugins. Note that these still need to be manually included with --include-module but now that works.

• For known truth values of the right hand side of and or or conditions, reduce the expression as far as possible.

• Added dedicated assignment node for hard imports, which then are propagated in classes as well, allowing for more static optimization for code on the class level.

• Added linker options to make static --static-libpython work with clang on Linux as well.

• macOS: Make sure libpython is loaded relative to the executable. This is needed for at least Anaconda Python.

• macOS: Fix, need to search environment specific DLL paths and only then global paths, otherwise mixed Python versions will not work correctly.

• Anti-Bloat: Remove IPython usage in rich package.

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid doctest dependency when using pyrect.

• Anti-Bloat: Some unittest removals from pytorch using libraries.

• Keep the Scons report items sorted, or else it varies for the hashing of dependencies with Python versions before 3.6, causing cache misses without need.

Organizational

• UI: Output the .cmd file created (if any) on Windows, e.g. when run in a virtualenv or for uninstalled Python versions, it will otherwise not run in accelerated mode, but previously the output suggested to run the executable directly.

• UI: Enhanced command line option description of --include-plugin-directory which is frequently misunderstood. That option barely does what people want it to do. Point them to using the other options that are easy to use and will work.

• UI: Specified needed Python version for use in --python-for-scons so users can know ahead of time what versions are suitable.

• Reports: Added information about data files including, optimization times per module, active plugins.

• Debugging: Repaired offline DLL dependency listing tool, such that it can be used during Windows DLL analysis.

• Make --xml accept a filename for the node tree dump, and change it so it can be executed in addition to actual compilation. This way we need not be super-robust about keeping stdout clean, to not break XML parsing.

• Plugins: Avoid useless warning about PySide2 plugin usage if another Qt plugin is actually selected.

• UI: Catch error of directories being used as data files where plain files are expected and point out that other options must be used.

• User Manual: Added section about accessing files in standalone mode too, so people can make sure it works properly.

• Onefile: Using %TEMP% folder should not by itself prevent cached onefile mode, only really variable paths should. People may want to have this as some kind of temporary cache still.

• UI: Catch user error of using elements, that resolve to absolute values in the middle of path specs, so using e.g. something/%PROGRAM% is now a mistake caught at compile time. These values can only be at the start of spec values naturally.

• Quality: Updated to newer version of rstfmt.

• UI: Nicer error message when a forbidden import is requested as an implicit import by a plugin.

• Python3.11: Adapted to allocator and exception state changes, but more will be needed to compile at all.

• Visual Code: Find clang-format from the recommended C++ extension of Visual Code, which makes it finally available on macOS easily too.

• UI: Quote command line argument values as necessary when stating them in the logging. Otherwise they are not directly usable on the shell and also less readable.

• Debian: Do not list fake modules as used debian packages codes, which could e.g. happen with the pre-load code of pkg_resources if that is from a Debian package. Fake packages should not be mentioned for these lists though.

• Nuitka-Python: Added support to set link time flags coming from statically included packages.

• For our isort trick of splitting files in two parts (mostly to setup import paths for nuitka package), make sure the second parts starts with a new line.

• Added more usable form --output-filename to specify the output filename, the short form has become barely usable after we switched to enforcing no space separation for command line arguments.

• UI: Check if output filename’s directory exists ahead of time, and error exit if not, otherwise compilation crashed only in the very end, trying to create the final result.

• UI: When exiting with no error code, do not use red color or FATAL error annotation, that is not justified.

• Quality: Make sure the Yaml auto-format does not change effective contents.

• Quality: Added ability to limit autoformat by file type, which can be handy when e.g. only the yaml files should be scanned.

• UI: Removed --windows-onefile-tempdir-spec alias of --onefile-tempdir-spec option, it is no longer Windows specific.

Cleanups

• Prefer single quotes rather than double quotes in our package configuration Yaml files, otherwise esp. regular expressions with escapes become very confusing.

• Move import hacks to general mechanism in Yaml package configuration files. This is for extra paths from package names or from directory paths relative to the package. This removes special purpose code from core code paths and allows their reuse.

• Again more spelling cleanups have been done, to make the code cleaner to read and search.

• Unified how plugins treat iteration over their value list, and how the when condition is applied for the various kinds of sections.

• Output compilation command that failed during coverage taking, which makes it unnecessary to attempt to reconstruct what happened from test modes.

Tests

• Added coverage for comparisons that need argument swaps.

• Allow more time in onefile keyboard signal test, otherwise it can be a race on slow machines, e.g. emulated machines.

• Tests: Added support for running a local web server.

Summary

This release is mainly a consolidation of previous release. Optimization added in previous release did in fact introduce regressions, that needed to be addressed and were cause for relatively many hotfixes.

The Yaml Nuitka Package Configuration feature is getting ever more powerful, but is not one bit more documented, such that the community as a whole is not yet capable of adding missing dependencies, data files, DLLs, and even anti-bloat patches.

New optimization was focused around compatibility with very few exceptions, where the non-automatic standard library work is standing out, and allows for smaller binaries in many cases.

Scalability has seen improvements through a few optimization, but mainly again with anti-bloat work being done. This is owed to the fact that consolidation was the name of the game.

For Anaconda specifically, a lot more software is covered, and generally, cv2 and torch related tools are now working better, but it seems DLL handling will remain problematic in many instances.

The compilation report contains much more information and is getting there is terms of completeness. At some point, we should ask for it in bug reports.

Nuitka Release 1.0

This release contains a large amount of new features, while consolidating what we have with many bug fixes. Scalability should be dramatically better, as well as new optimization that will accelerate some code quite a bit. See the summary, how this release is paving the way forward.

Bug Fixes

• Python3: Fix, bytes.decode with only errors argument given was not working. Fixed in 0.9.1 already.

• MSYS2: Fix, the accelerate mode .cmd file was not working correctly. Fixed in 0.9.1 already.

• Onefile: Fix, the bootstrap when waiting for the child, didn’t protect against signals that interrupt this call. This only affected users of the non-public --onefile-tempdir option on Linux, but with that becoming the default in 1.0, this was discovered. Fixed in 0.9.1 already.

• Fix, pkg_resources compile time generated Distribution values could cause issues with code that put it into calls, or in tried blocks. Fixed in 0.9.1 already.

• Standalone: Added implicit dependencies of Xlib package. Fixed in 0.9.1 already.

• macOS: Fix, the package configuration for wx had become invalid when restructuring the Yaml with code and schema disagreeing on allowed values. Fixed in 0.9.1 already.

• Fix: The str.format with a single positional argument didn’t generate proper code and failed to compile on the C level. Fixed in 0.9.1 already.

• Fix, the type shape of str.count result was wrong. Fixed in 0.9.1 already.

• UI: Fix, the warning about collision of just compiled package and original package in the same folder hiding the compiled package should not apply to packages without an __init__.py file, as those do not take precedence. Fixed in 0.9.2 already.

• Debugging: Fix, the fallback to lldb from gdb when using the option --debugger was broken on anything but Windows. Fixed in 0.9.2 already.

• Python3.8: The module importlib.metadata was not recognized before 3.9, but actually 3.8 already has it, causing the compile time resolution of package versions to not work there. Fixed in 0.9.3 already.

• Standalone: Fix, at least on macOS we should also scan from parent folders of DLLs, since they may contain sub-directories in their names. This is mostly the case, when using frameworks. Fixed in 0.9.2 already.

• Standalone: Added package configuration for PyQt5 to require onefile bundle mode on macOS, and recommend to disable console for PyQt6. This is same as we already do for PySide2 and PySide6. Fixed in 0.9.2 already.

• Standalone: Removed stray macOS onefile bundle package configuration for pickle module which must have been added in error. Fixed in 0.9.2 already.

• UI: Catch user error of attempting to compile the __init__.py rather than the package directory. Fixed in 0.9.2 already.

• Fix, hard name import nodes failed to clone, causing issues in optimization phase. Fixed in 0.9.2 already.

• Fix, avoid warnings given with gcc 11. Fixed in 0.9.2 already.

• Fix, dictionary nodes where the operation itself has no effect, e.g. dict.copy were not properly annotating that their dictionary argument could still cause a raise and have side effects, triggering an assertion violation in Nuitka. Fixed in 0.9.2 already.

• Standalone: Added pynput implicit dependencies on Linux. Fixed in 0.9.2 already.

• Fix, boolean condition checks on variables converted immutable constant value assignments to boolean values, leading to incorrect code execution. Fixed in 0.9.2 already.

• Python3.9: Fix, could crash on generic aliases with non-hashable values. Fixed in 0.9.3 already.

  dict[str:any]
  

• Python3: Fix, an iteration over sys.version_info was falsely optimized into a tuple, which is not always compatible. Fixed in 0.9.3 already.

• Standalone: Added support for xgboost package. Fixed in 0.9.3 already.

• Standalone: Added data file for text_unidecode package. Fixed in 0.9.4 already.

• Standalone: Added data files for swagger_ui_bundle package. Fixed in 0.9.4 already.

• Standalone: Added data files for connexion package. Fixed in 0.9.4 already.

• Standalone: Added implicit dependencies for sklearn.utils and rapidfuzz. Fixed in 0.9.4 already.

• Python3.10: Fix, the reformulation of match statements could create nodes that are used twice, causing code generation to assert. Fixed in 0.9.4 already.

• Fix, module objects removed from sys.modules but still used could lack a reference to themselves, and therefore crash due to working on a released module variables dictionary. Fixed in 0.9.5 already.

• Fix, the MSVC compiles code generated for SciPy 1.8 wrongly. Added a workaround for that code to avoid triggering it. Fixed in 0.9.6 already.

• Fix, calls to str.format where the result is not used, could crash the compiler during code generation. Fixed in 0.9.6 already.

• Standalone: For DLLs on macOS and Anaconda, also consider the lib directory of the root environment, as some DLLs are otherwise not found.

• Fix, allow nonlocal and global for __class__ to be used on the class level.

• Fix, xrange with large values didn’t work on all platforms. This affected at least Python2 on macOS, but potentially others as well.

• Windows: When scanning for installed Pythons to e.g. run Scons or onefile compression, it was attempting to use installations that got deleted manually and could crash.

• macOS: Fix, DLL conflicts are now resolved by checking the version information too, also all cases that previously errored out after a conflict was reported, will now work.

• Fix, conditional expressions whose statically decided condition picking a branch will raise an exception could crash the compilation.

  # Would previously crash Nuitka during optimization.
  return 1/0 if os.name == "nt" else 1/0
  

• Windows: Make sure we set C level standard file handles too

  At least newer subprocess was affected by this, being unable to provide working handles to child processes that pass their current handles through, and also this should help DLL code to use it as level.

• Standalone: Added support for pyqtgraph data files.

• Standalone: Added support for dipy by anti-bloat removal of its testing framework that wants to do unsupported stuff.

• UI: Could still give warnings about modules not being followed, where that was not true.

• Fix, --include-module was not working for non-automatic standard library paths.

New Features

• Onefile: Recognize a non-changing path from --onefile-tempdir-spec and then use cached mode. By default a temporary folder is used in the spec value, make it delete the files afterwards.

  The cached mode is not necessarily faster, but it is not going to change files already there, leaving the binaries there intact. In the future it may also become faster to execute, but right now checking the validity of the file takes about as long as re-creating it, therefore no gain yet. The main point, is to not change where it runs from.

• Standalone: Added option to exclude DLLs. You can npw use --noinclude-dlls to exclude DLLs by filename patterns.

  The may e.g. come from Qt plugins, where you know, or experimented, that it is not going to be used in your specific application. Use with care, removing DLLs will lead to very hard to recognize errors.

• Anaconda: Use CondaCC from environment variables for Linux and macOS, in case it is installed. This can be done with e.g. conda install gcc_linux-64 on Linux or conda install clang_osx-64 on macOS.

• Added new option --nowarn-mnemonic to disable warnings that use mnemonics, there is currently not that many yet, but it’s going to expand. You can use this to acknowledge the ones you accept, and not get that warning with the information pointer anymore.

• Added method for resolving DLL conflicts on macOS too. This is using version information and picks the newer one where possible.

• Added option --user-package-configuration-file for user provided Yaml files, which can be used to provide package configuration to Nuitka, to e.g. add DLLs, data files, do some anti-bloat work, or add missing dependencies locally. The documentation for this does not yet exist though, but Nuitka contains a Yaml schema in the misc/nuitka-package-config-schema.json file.

• Added nuitka-project-else to avoid repeating conditions in Nuitka project configuration, this can e.g. be used like this:

  # nuitka-project-if: os.getenv("TEST_VARIANT", "pyside2") == "pyside2":
  #   nuitka-project: --enable-plugin=no-qt
  # nuitka-project-else:
  #   nuitka-project: --enable-plugin=no-qt
  #   nuitka-project: --noinclude-data-file=*.svg
  

  Previously, the inverted condition had to be used in another nuitka-project-if which is no big deal, but less readable.

• Added support for deep copying uncompiled functions. There is now a section in the User Manual that explains how to clone compiled functions. This allows a workaround like this:

  def binder(func, name):
     try:
        result = func.clone()
     except AttributeError:
        result = types.FunctionType(func.__code__, func.__globals__, name=func.__name__, argdefs=func.__defaults__, closure=func.__closure__)
        result = functools.update_wrapper(result, func)
        result.__kwdefaults__ = func.__kwdefaults__
  
     result.__name__ = name
     return result
  

• Plugins: Added explicit deprecation status of a plugin. We now have a few that do nothing, and are just there for compatibility with existing users, and this now informs the user properly rather than just saying it is not relevant.

• Fix, some Python installations crash when attempting to import modules, such as os with a ModuleName object, because we limit string operations done, and e.g. refuse to do .startswith which of course, other loaders that your installation has added, might still use.

• Windows: In case of not found DLLs, we can still examine the run time of the currently compiling Python process of Nuitka, and locate them that way, which helps for some Python configurations to support standalone, esp. to find CPython DLL in unusual spots.

• Debian: Workaround for lib2to3 data files. These are from stdlib and therefore the patched code from Debian needs to be undone, to make these portable again.

Optimization

• Scalability: Avoid merge traces of initial variable versions, which came into play when merging a variable used in only one branch. These are useless and only made other optimization slower or impossible.

• Scalability: Also avoid merge traces of merge traces, instead flatten merge traces and avoid the duplication doing so. There were pathological cases, where this reduced optimization time for functions from infinite to instant.

• For comparison helpers, switch comparison where possible, such that there are only 3 variants, rather than 6. Instead the boolean result is inverted, e.g. changing >= into not < effectively. Of course this can only be done for types, where we know that nothing special, i.e. no method overloads of __gte__ is going on.

• For binary operations that are commutative with the selected types, in mixed type cases, swap the arguments during code generation, such that e.g. long_a + float_b is actually computed as float_b + long_a. This again avoids many helpers. It also can be done for * with integers and container types.

• In cases, where a comparison (or one of the few binary operation where we consider it useful), is used in a boolean context, but we know it is impossible to raise an exception, a C boolean result type is used rather than a nuitka_bool which is now only used when necessary, because it can indicate the exception result.

• Anti-Bloat: More anti-bloat work was done for popular packages, covering also uses of setuptools_scm, nose and nose2 package removals and warnings. There was also a focus on making mmvc, tensorflow and tifffile compile well, removing e.g. the uses of the tensorflow testing framework.

• Faster comparison of int values with constant values, this uses helpers that work with C long values that represent a single “digit” of a value, or ones that use the full value space of C long.

• Faster comparison of float values with constant values, this uses helpers that work with C float values, avoiding the useless Python level constant objects.

• Python2: Comparison of int and long now has specialized helpers that avoids converting the int to a long through coercion. This takes advantage of code to compare C long values (which are at the core of Python2 int objects, with long objects.

• For binary operation on mixed types, e.g. int * bytes the slot of the first function was still considered, and called to give a Py_NotImplemented return value for no good reason. This also applies to mixed operations of int, long, and float types, and for str and unicode values on Python2.

• Added missing helper for ** operation with floats, this had been overlooked so far.

• Added dedicated nodes for ctypes.CDLL which aims to allow us to detect used DLLs at compile time in the future, and to move closer to support its bindings more efficiently.

• Added specialized nodes for dict.popitem as well. With this, now all of the dictionary methods are specialized.

• Added specialized nodes for str.expandtabs, str.translate, str.ljust, str.rjust, str.center, str.zfill, and str.splitlines. While these are barely performance relevant, this completes all str methods, except removeprefix and removesuffix that are Python3.9 or higher.

• Added type shape for result of str.index operation as well, this was missing so far.

• Optimize str, bytes and dict method calls through variables.

• Optimize calls through variables containing e.g. mutable constant values, these will be rare, because they all become exceptions.

• Optimize calls through variables containing built-in values, unlocking optimization of such calls, where it is assigned to a local variable.

• For generated attribute nodes, avoid local doing import statements on the function level. While these were easier to generate, they can only be slow at run time.

• For the str built-in annotate its value as derived from str, which unfortunately does not allow much optimization, since that can still change many things, but it was still a missing attribute.

• For variable value release nodes, specialize them by value type as well, enhancing the scalability, because e.g. parameter variable specific tests, need not be considered for all other variable types as well.

Organizational

• Plugins: Major changes to the Yaml file content, cleaning up some of the DLL configuration to more easy to use.

  The DLL configuration has two flavors, one from code and one from filename matching, and these got separated into distinct items in the Yaml configuration. Also how source and dest paths get provided got simplified, with a relative path now being used consistently and with sane defaults, deriving the destination path from where the module lives. Also what we called patterns, are actually prefixes, as there is still the platform specific DLL file naming appended.

• Plugins: Move mode checks to dedicated plugin called options-nanny that is always enabled, giving also much cleaner Yaml configuration with a new section added specifically for these. It controls advice on the optional or required use of --disable-console and the like. Some packages, e.g. wx are known to crash on macOS when the console is enabled, so this advice is now done with saner configuration.

• Plugins: Also for all Yaml configuration sub-items where is now a consistent when field, that allows checking Python version, OS, Nuitka modes such as standalone, and only apply configuration when matching this criterion, with that the anti-bloat options to allow certain bloat, should now have proper effect as well.

• The use of AppImage on Linux is no more. The performance for startup was always slower, while having lost the main benefit of avoiding IO at startup, due to new cached mode, so now we always use the same bootstrap binary as on macOS and Windows.

• UI: Do not display implicit reports reported by plugins by default anymore. These have become far too many, esp. with the recent stdlib work, and often do not add any value. The compilation report will become where to turn to find out why a module in included.

• UI: Ask the user to install the ordered set package that will actually work for the specific Python version, rather than making him try one of two, where sometimes only one can work, esp. with Python 3.10 allowing only one.

• GitHub: More clear wording in the issue template that python -m nuitka --version output is really required for support to given.

• Attempt to use Anaconda ccache binary if installed on non-Windows. This is esp. handy on macOS, where it is harder to get it.

• Windows: Avoid byte-compiling the inline copy of Scons that uses Python3 when installing for Python2.

• Added experimental switches to disable certain optimization in order to try out their impact, e.g. on corruption bugs.

• Reports: Added included DLLs for standalone mode to compilation report.

• Reports: Added control tags influencing plugin decisions to the compilation report.

• Plugins: Make the implicit-imports dependency section in the Yaml package configuration a list, for consistency with other blocks.

• Plugins: Added checking of tags such from the package configuration, so that for things dependent on python version (e.g. python39_or_higher, before_python39), the usage of Anaconda (anaconda) or certain OS (e.g. macos), or modes (e.g. standalone), expressions in when can limit a configuration item.

• Quality: Re-enabled string normalization from black, the issues with changes that are breaking to Python2 have been worked around.

• User Manual: Describe using a minimal virtualenv as a possible help low memory situations as well.

• Quality: The yaml auto-format now properly preserves comments, being based on ruamel.yaml.

• Nuitka-Python: Added support for the Linux build with Nuitka-Python for our own CPython fork as well, previously only Windows was working, amd macOS will follow later.

• The commit hook when installed from git bash was working, but doing so from cmd.exe didn’t find a proper path for shell from the git location.

• Debugging: A lot of experimental toggles were added, that allow control over the use of certain optimization, e.g. use of dict, list, iterators, subscripts, etc. internals, to aid in debugging in situations where it’s not clear, if these are causing the issue or not.

• Added support for Fedora 36, which requires some specific linker options, also recognize Fedora based distributions as such.

• Removed long deprecated option --noinclude-matplotlib from numpy plugin, as it hasn’t had an effect for a long time now.

• Visual Code: Added extension for editing Jinja2 templates. This one even detects that we are editing C or Python and properly highlights accordingly.

Cleanups

• Standalone: Major cleanup of the dependency analysis for standalone. There is no longer a distinction between entry points (main binary, extension modules) and DLLs that they depend on. The OS specific parts got broken out into dedicated modules as well and decisions are now taken immediately.

• Plugins: Split the Yaml package configuration files into 3 files. One contains now Python2 only stdlib configuration, and another one general stdlib.

• Plugins: Also cleanup the zmq plugin, which was one the last holdouts of now removed plugin method, moving parts to the Yaml configuration. We therefore no longer have considerExtraDlls which used to work on the standalone folder, but instead only plugin code that provides included DLL or binary objects from getExtraDlls which gives Nuitka much needed control over DLL copying. This was a long lasting battle finally won, and will allow many new features to come.

• UI: Avoid changing whitespace in warnings, where we have intended line breaks, e.g. in case of duplicate DLLs. Went over all warnings and made sure to either avoid new-lines or have them, depending on wanted output.

• Iterator end check code now uses the same code as rich comparison expressions and can benefit from optimization being done there as well.

• Solved TODO item about code generation time C types to specify if they have error checking or not, rather than hard coding it.

• Production of binary helper function set was cleaned up massively, but still needs more work, comparison helper function set was also redesigned.

• Changing the spelling of our container package to become more clear.

• Used namedtuple objects for storing used DLL information for more clear code.

• Added spellchecker ignores for all attribute and argument names of generated fixed attribute nodes.

• In auto-format make sure the imports float to the top. That very much cleans up generated attribute nodes code, allowing also to combine the many ones it makes, but also cleans up some of our existing code.

• The package configuration Yaml files are now sorted according to module names. This will help to avoid merge conflicts during hotfixes merge back to develop and automatically group related entries in a sane way.

• Moved large amounts of code producing implicit imports to Yaml configuration files.

• Changed the tensorflow plugin to Yaml based configuration, making it a deprecated do nothing plugin, that only remains there for a few releases, to not crash existing build scripts.

• Lots of spelling cleanups, e.g. renaming nuitka.codegen to nuitka.code_generation for clarity.

Tests

• Added generated test to cover bytes method. This would have found the issue with decode potentially.

• Enhanced standalone test for ctypes on Linux to actually have something to test.

Summary

This release improves on many things at once. A lot of work has been put into polishing the Yaml configuration that now only lacks documentation and examples, such that the community as a whole should become capable of adding missing dependencies, data files, DLLs, and even anti-bloat patches.

Then a lot of new optimization has been done, to close the missing gaps with dict and str methods, but before completing list which is already a work in progress pull request, and bytes, we want to start and generate the node classes that form the link or basis of dedicated nodes. This will be an area to work on more.

The many improvements to existing code helpers, and them being able to pick target types for the arguments of comparisons and binary operations, is a pre-cursor to universal optimization of this kind. What is currently only done for constant values, will in the future be interesting for picking specific C types for use. That will then be a huge difference from what we are doing now, where most things still have to use PyObject * based types.

Scalability has again seen very real improvements, memory usage of Nuitka itself, as well as compile time inside Nuitka are down by a lot for some cases, very noticeably. There is never enough of this, but it appears, in many cases now, large compilations run much faster.

For macOS specifically, the new DLL dependency analysis, is much more capable or resolving conflicts all by itself. Many of the more complex packages with some variants of Python, specifically Anaconda will now be working a lot better.

And then, of course there is the big improvement for Onefile, that allows to use cached paths. This will make it more usable in the general case, e.g. where the firewall of Windows hate binaries that change their path each time they run.

Future directions will aim to make the compilation report more concise, and given reasons and dependencies as they are known on the inside more clearly, such that is can be a major tool for testing, bug reporting and analysis of the compilation result.