Nuitka Changelog

In this document, we track the per version changes and comments for 2.1 down to Nuitka 2.0 release. There is also a draft of the change of upcoming new release 2.2 that contains information about hot-fixes (2.1.2) of the current stable release.

Nuitka Release 2.2 (Draft)

This a draft of the release notes for 2.2, which is supposed to contains the usual additions of new packages supported out of the box and will aim at scalability.

Bug Fixes

  • Standalone: Added support for pypdfium2 package. Fixed in 2.1.1 already.

  • Standalone: Make cefpython3 work on Linux. Fixed in 2.1.1 already.

  • ArchLinux: Need to add linker option for it to be usable with their current Arch Python package. Fixed in 2.1.1 already.

  • Fix, ctypes.CDLL optimization was using mis-spelled argument name for use_last_error, such that keyword argument calls using it were statically optimized into TypeError at compile-time. Fixed in 2.1.1 already.

  • Fix, list.insert was not properly annotating exceptions. Raises by producing the inserted value raised or the index were not annotated, and therefore could fail to be caught locally. Fixed in 2.1.1 already.

  • Standalone: Added support for selenium package. Fixed in 2.1.2 already.

  • Standalone: Added support for hydra package. Fixed in 2.1.2 already.

New Features

  • For Nuitka package configuration, we now have change_class similar to change_function to replace a full class definition with something else, this can be used to modify classes to become stubs or even unusable.

  • For the experimental @pyqtSlot decorator, we also should handle the @asyncSlot just the same. Added in 2.1.1 already.

Optimization

  • ArchLinux: Enable static libpython by default, it is usable indeed. Added in 2.1.2 already.

  • Anti-Bloat: Avoid unittest usage in antlr package.

  • Anti-Bloat: Avoid IPython in celery package. Added in 2.1.2 already.

Organisational

  • UI: Catch wrong values for --jobs value sooner, negative and non-integer values error exit immediately. Added in 2.1.1 already.

Summary

This release is not yet done, but is supposed to focus again on scalability.

Nuitka Release 2.1

This release had focus on new features and new optimization. There is a also a large amount of compatibility with things newly added to support anti-bloat better, and workaround problems with newer package versions that would otherwise need source code at run-time.

Bug Fixes

  • Windows: Using older MSVC before 14.3 was not working anymore. Fixed in 2.0.1 already.

  • Compatibility: The dill-compat plugin didn’t work for functions with closure variables taken. Fixed in 2.0.1 already.

    def get_local_closure(b):
      def _local_multiply(x, y):
        return x * y + b
      return _local_multiply
    
    fn = get_local_closure(1)
    fn2 = dill.loads(dill.dumps(fn))
    print(fn2(2, 3))
    
  • Windows: Fix, sometimes kernel32.dll is actually reported as a dependency, remove assertion against that. Fixed in 2.0.1 already.

  • UI: The help output for --output-filename was not formatted properly. Fixed in 2.0.1 already.

  • Standalone: Added support for the scapy package. Fixed in 2.0.2 already.

  • Standalone: Added PonyORM implicit dependencies. Fixed in 2.0.2 already.

  • Standalone: Added support for cryptoauthlib, betterproto, tracerite, sklearn.util, and qt_material packages. Fixed in 2.0.2 already.

  • Standalone: Added missing data file for scipy package. Fixed in 2.0.2 already.

  • Standalone: Added missing DLLs for speech_recognition package. Fixed in 2.0.2 already.

  • Standalone: Added missing DLL for gmsh package. Fixed in 2.0.2 already.

  • UI: Using reporting path in macOS dependency scan error message, otherwise these contain home directory paths for no good reason. Fixed in 2.0.2 already.

  • UI: Fix, could crash when compiling directories with trailing slashes used. At least on Windows, this happened for the “/” slash value. Fixed in 2.0.2 already.

  • Module: Fix, convenience option --run was not considering --output-dir directory to load the result module. Without this, the check for un-replaced module was always triggering for module source in current directory, despite doing the right thing and putting it elsewhere. Fixed in 2.0.2 already.

  • Python2: Avoid values for __file__ of modules that are unicode and solve a TODO that restores consistency over modules mode __file__ values. Fixed in 2.0.2 already.

  • Windows: Fix, short paths with and without dir name cached wrongly, which could lead to shorted paths even where not asked for them. Fixed in 2.0.2 already.

  • Fix, comparing list values that changed could segfault. This is a bug fix Python did, that we didn’t follow yet and that became apparent after using our dedicated list helpers more often. Fixed in 2.0.2 already.

  • Standalone: Added support for tiktoken package. Fixed in 2.0.2 already.

  • Standalone: Fix, namespace packages had wrong runtime __path__ value. Fixed in 2.0.2 already.

  • Python3.11: Fix, was using tuples from freelist of the wrong size

    • CPython changed the index for the size, to not use zero, which was wasteful when introduced with 3.10, but to size-1 but we did not follow that and then used a tuple one bit larger than necessary.

    • As a result, code producing a lot short living tuples could end up creating new ones over and over, causing bad memory allocations and slow performance.

    Fixed in 2.0.2 already.

  • macOS: Fix, need to allow non-existent and versioned dependencies of DLLs to themselves. Fixed in 2.0.2 already.

  • Windows: Fix PGO (Profile Guided Optimization) build errors with MinGW64, this feature is not yet ready for general use, but these errors shouldn’t happen. Fixed in 2.0.2 already.

  • Plugins: Fix, do not load importlib_metadata unless really necessary.

    The pkg_resources plugin used to load it, and that then had harmful effects for our handling of distribution information in some configurations. Fixed in 2.0.3 already.

  • Plugins: Avoid warnings from plugin evaluated code, it could happen that a UserWarning would be displayed during compilation. Fixed in 2.0.3 already.

  • Fix, loading pickles with compiled functions in module mode was not working. Fixed in 2.0.3 already.

  • Standalone: Added data files for h2o package. Fixed in 2.0.3 already.

  • Fix, variable assignment from variables that started to raise were not recognized.

    When a variable assignment from a variable became a raise expression, that wasn’t caught and propagated as it should have been. Fixed in 2.0.3 already.

  • Make the NUITKA_PYTHONPATH usage more robust. Fixed in 2.0.3 already.

  • Fix, PySide2/6 argument name for slot connection and disconnect should be slot, wasn’t working with keyword argument calls. Fixed in 2.0.3 already.

  • Standalone: Added support for paddle and paddleocr packages. Fixed in 2.0.4 already.

  • Standalone: Added support for diatheke. Fixed in 2.0.4 already.

  • Standalone: Added support for zaber-motion package. Fixed in 2.0.4 already.

  • Standalone: Added support for plyer package. Fixed in 2.0.4 already.

  • Fix, added handling of OSError for metadata read, otherwise corrupt packages can have Nuitka crashing. Fixed in 2.0.4 already.

  • Fix, need to annotate potential exception exit when making a fixed import from hard module attribute. Fixed in 2.0.4 already.

  • Fix, didn’t consider Nuitka project options with --main and --script-path. This is of course the only way Nuitka-Action does call it, so they didn’t work there at all. Fixed in 2.0.4 already.

  • Scons: Fix, need to close progress bar when about to error exit. Otherwise error outputs will be garbled by incomplete progress bar. Fixed in 2.0.4 already.

  • Fix, need to convert relative from imports to hard imports too, or else packages needed to be followed are not included. Fixed in 2.0.5 already.

  • Standalone: Added pygame_menu data files. Fixed in 2.0.6 already.

  • Windows: Fix, wasn’t working when compiling on network mounted drive letters. Fixed in 2.0.6 already.

  • Fix, the .pyi parser was crashing on some comments with a leading from in the line, recognize these better. Fixed in 2.0.6 already.

  • Actions: Fix, some yaml configs could fail to load plugins. Fixed in 2.0.6 already.

  • Standalone: Added support for newer torch packages that otherwise require source code.

  • Fix, inline copies of tqdm etc. left sub-modules behind, removing only the top level sys.modules entry may not be enough.

New Features

  • Plugins: Added support for constants in Nuitka package configurations. We can now using when clauses, define variable values to be defined, e.g. to specify the DLL suffix, or the DLL path, based on platform dependent properties.

  • Plugins: Make relative_path, suffix, prefix in DLL Nuitka package configurations allowed to be an expression rather than just a constant value.

  • Plugins: Make not only booleans related to the python version available, but also strings python_version_str and python_version_full_str, to use them when constructing e.g. DLL paths in Nuitka package configuration.

  • Plugins: Added helper function iterate_modules for producing the submodules of a given package, for using in expressions of Nuitka package configuration.

  • macOS: Added support for Tcl/Tk detection on Homebrew Python.

  • Added module attribute to __compiled__ values

    So far it was impossible to distinguish non-standalone, i.e. accelerated mode and module compilation by looking at the “__compiled__” attribute, so we add an indicator for module mode that closes this gap.

  • Plugins: Added appdirs and importlib for use in Nuitka package config expressions.

  • Plugins: Added ability to specify modules to not follow when a module is used. This nofollow configuration is for rare use cases only.

  • Plugins: Added values extension_std_suffix and extension_suffix for use in expressions, to e.g. construct DLL suffix patterns from it.

  • UI: Added more control over caching with per cache category environment variables, as documented in the User Manual..

  • Plugins: Added support for reporting module detections

    The delvewheel plugin now puts the version of that packaging tool used by a particular module in the report rather than tracing it to the user, that in the normal case won’t care. This is more for debugging purposes of Nuitka.

Optimization

  • Scalability: Do not make loop analysis at all for very trusted value traces, their point is to not change, and waiting for that to be confirmed has no point.

  • Use very trusted value traces in functions not just as mere assign traces or else expected optimization will not be done on them in many cases. With this a lot more cases of hard values are optimized leading also to generally more compact and correct results in terms of imports, metadata, code avoided on the wrong OS, etc.

  • Scalability: When specializing assignments, make sure to have the proper value trace immediately.

    When changing to a hard value, the value trace was still an assign trace and not very trusted for one for micro pass of the module.

    This had the effect to need one more micro pass to get to benefiting of the unescapable nature of those values, which meant more micro passes than necessary and those being more complex due to escaped traces, and therefore taking longer for affected modules.

  • Scalability: The code trying avoid merge traces of merge traces, and to instead flatten merge traces was only handling part of these correctly, and correcting it reduced optimization time for some functions from infinite to instant. Less memory usage should also come out of this, even where this was not affecting compile time as much. Added in 2.0.1 already.

  • Scalability: Some codes that checked for variables were testing for temporary variable and normal variable both one after another, making some optimization steps and code generation slower than necessary due to the extra calls.

  • Scalability: A variable assignment from variable that were later recognized to become a raise was not recognized as such, and this then wasn’t caught and propagated as it should, preventing more optimization of the affected code. Make sure to convert more directly when observing things to change, rather than doing it one pass later.

  • The fix proper reuse of tuples released to the freelist with matching sizes causes less memory usage and faster performance for the 3.11 version. Added in 2.0.2 already.

  • Statically optimize sys.exit into exception raise of SystemExit.

    This should make a bunch of dead code obvious to Nuitka, it can now tell this aborts execution of a branch, potentially eliminating imports, etc.

  • macOS: Enable python static link library for Homebrew too. Added in 2.0.1 already. Added in 2.0.3 already.

  • Avoid compiling bloated module namespace of altair package. Added in 2.0.3 already.

  • Anti-Bloat: Avoid including kubernetes for tensorflow unless used otherwise. Added in 2.0.3 already.

  • Anti-Bloat: Avoid including setuptools for tqdm. Added in 2.0.3 already.

  • Anti-Bloat: Avoid IPython in fire package. Added in 2.0.3 already.

  • Anti-Bloat: Avoid including Cython for pydantic package. Added in 2.0.3 already.

  • Anti-Bloat: Changes to avoid triton in newer torch as well. Added in 2.0.5 already.

  • Anti-Bloat: Avoid setuptools via setuptools_scm in pyarrow.

  • Anti-Bloat: Made more packages equivalent to using setuptools which we want to avoid, all of Cython, cython, pyximport, paddle.utils.cpp_extension, torch.utils.cpp_extension were added for better reports of the actual causes.

Organisational

  • Moved the changelog of Nuitka to the website, just point to there from Nuitka repo.

  • UI: Proper error message from Nuitka when scons build fails with a detail mnemonic page. Read more on the info page for detailed information.

  • Windows: Reject all MinGW64 that are not are not the winlibs that Nuitka itself downloaded. As these packages break very easily, we need to control if it’s a working set of ccache, make, binutils and gcc with all the necessary workarounds and features like LTO working on Windows properly.

  • Quality: Added auto-format of PNG and JPEG images. This aims at making it simpler to add images to our repositories, esp. Nuitka Website. This now makes optipng and jpegoptim calls as necessary. Previously this was manual steps for the website to be applied.

  • User Manual: Be more clear about compiler version needs on Windows for Python 3.11.

  • User Manual: Added examples for error message with low C compiler memory, such that maybe they can be found via search by users.

  • User Manual: Removed sections that are unnecessary or better maintained as separate pages on the website.

  • Quality: Avoid empty no-auto-follow values, for silently ignoring it there is a dedicated string ignore that must be used.

  • Quality: Enforce normalized paths for dest_path and relative_path. Users were uncertain if a leading dot made sense, but we now disallow it for clarity.

  • Quality: Check more keys with expressions for syntax errors, to catch these mistakes in configuration sooner.

  • Quality: Scanning through all files with the auto-format tool should now be faster, and CPython test suite directories (test submodules) if present are ignored.

  • Release: Remove month from manpage generation, that’s only noise in diffs.

  • Removed digital art folders, these were only making checkouts larger for no good reason. We will have better ones on the website in the future.

  • Scons: Allow C warnings when compiling for running in debugger automatically.

  • UI: The macOS app bundle option is not experimental at all. This has been untrue for years now, remove that cautioning.

  • macOS: Discontinue support for PyQt6.

    With newer PyQt6 we would have to package frameworks properly, and we don’t have that yet and it will be a lot of developer time to get it.

    Instead point people to PySide6 which is the better choice and is perfectly supported by Qt company and Nuitka.

  • Removed version numbering, month of creation, etc. from the man pages generated.

  • Moved Credits.rst file to be on the website and maintain it there rather than syncing of from the Nuitka repository.

  • Bumped copyright year and split the license text such that it is now at the bottom of the files rather than eating up the first page, this is aimed at making the code more readable.

Cleanups

  • With sys.exit being optimized, we were able to make our trick to avoid following nuitka because of accidentally finding the setup as an import more simple.

    # Don't allow importing this, and make recognizable that
    # the above imports are not to follow. Sometimes code imports
    # setup and then Nuitka ends up including itself.
    if __name__ != "__main__":
       sys.exit("Cannot import 'setup' module of Nuitka")
    
  • Scons: Don’t scan for ccache on Windows, the winlibs package contains it nowadays, and since it’s now required to be used, there is no point for this code anymore.

  • Minor cleanups coming from trying out ruff as a linter on Nuitka, it found a few uses of not using not in, but that was it.

Tests

  • Removed test with chinese filenames, we need to avoid chinese names in the repo. These have been seen as preventing installation on some systems that are not capable of handling them in the git, zip, pip tooling, so lets avoid them entirely now that Nuitka handles these just fine.

  • Tests: More macOS standalone tests that need to be bundles were getting the project configuration to do it.

Summary

This release added much needed tools for our Nuitka Package configuration, but also cleans up scalability and optimization that was supposed to work, but did not yet, or not anymore.

The usability improved again, as it does always, but the big improvements for scalability that will implement existing algorithms more efficient, are yet to come, this release was mainly driven by the need to get torch to work in its latest version out of the box with stable Nuitka, but this couldn’t be done as a hotfix

Nuitka Release 2.0

This release had focus on new features and new optimization. There is a really large amount of compatibility with things newly added, but also massive amounts of new features, and esp. for macOS and Windows, lot of platform specified new abilities and corrections.

Bug Fixes

  • Fix, workaround for private functions as Qt slots not having names mangled. Fixed in 1.9.1 already.

  • Fix, when using Nuitka with pdm it was not detected as using pip packages. Fixed in 1.9.1 already.

  • Fix, for pydantic our lazy loader parser didn’t handle all cases properly yet. Fixed in 1.9.1 already.

  • Standalone: Added data files for pyocd package. Fixed in 1.9.1 already.

  • Standalone: Added DLL for cmsis_pack_manager package. Fixed in 1.9.1 already.

  • Standalone: Fix, the specs expanded at run time in some causes could contain random characters. Fixed in 1.9.2 already.

  • Fix, {"a":b, ...}.get("b") could crash at runtime. Fixed in 1.9.2 already.

  • Standalone: Added data files for pyproj package. Fixed in 1.9.2 already.

  • Standalone: Added more metadata requirements for transformers package. Fixed in 1.9.2 already.

  • Plugins: Fix, could crash when including packages from the command line, if they had yaml configuration that requires checking the using module, e.g. anti-bloat work. Fixed in 1.9.3 already.

  • Standalone: Added support for delphifmx package. Fixed in 1.9.4 already.

  • Android: Fix, cannot exclude libz on that platform, it’s not a full Linux OS. Fixed in 1.9.3 already.

  • Standalone: Add needed DLLs for bitsandbytes package. Fixed in 1.9.3 already.

  • Windows: Fix, newer joblib was not working anymore. Fixed in 1.9.3 already.

  • Windows: Fix, could crash when working with junctions that switch drives. Fixed in 1.9.3 already.

  • Fix, was crashing with poetry installed environments. Fixed in 1.9.3 already.

  • Standalone: Added support for newer chromadb package. Fixed in 1.9.3 already.

  • Fix, could crash in report creation on modules excluded that were asked via command line for inclusion. Fixed in 1.9.3 already.

  • Anti-Bloat: Fix for newer streamlit, it was causing SyntaxError for the compilation. Fixed in 1.9.4 already.

  • Arch: Added support for their OS release file location too. Fixed in 1.9.4 already.

  • Windows: Fix, MinGW64 doesn’t accept chinese module names a C source files. Use short paths for these instead. Fixed in 1.9.4 already.

  • Standalone: Added missing DLL for libusb_package package. Fixed in 1.9.4 already.

  • Fix, properly skip directories with non-module top level names when trying to find top level packages of distributions. Fixed in 1.9.4 already.

  • Fix, avoid memory leak bug in triggered by rich package. Fixed in 1.9.4 already.

  • Python3.11+: Fix, didn’t detect non-keywords on star dict calls in some cases. Fixed in 1.9.4 already.

  • Fix, avoid crashes due to unrecognized installers on macOS and Windows, some packages that are built via legacy fallbacks of certain pip versions do not leave any indication of their origin at all. Fixed in 1.9.4 already.

  • Windows: Fix, need to indicate that the program is long path aware or else it cannot work with the paths. Fixed in 1.9.4 already.

  • Debian: The extern namespace might not exist in the pkg_resources module, make the code work with versions that remove it and use the proper external package names then. Fixed in 1.9.6 already.

  • Compatibility: Fix, need to also have .exists method in our files reader objects. Fixed in 1.9.5 already.

  • macOS: Fix, PyQt5 standalone can fail due to libqpdf too.

  • Compatibility: Make dill-compat plugin support module mode too, previously this only worked for executables only. Fixed in 1.9.6 already.

  • Standalone: Added data file for curl_cffi package. Fixed in 1.9.6 already.

  • Windows: Fix warnings given by MinGW64 in debug mode for onefile compilation. Fixed in 1.9.6 already.

  • Python2: The handling of DLL permission changes was not robust against using unicode filenames. Fixed in 1.9.7 already.

  • Python2: Fix, could crash on Debian packages when detecting their installer. Fixed in 1.9.7 already.

  • Standalone: Added required data file for astor package. Fixed in 1.9.7 already.

  • Reports: Fix, in case of build crashes during optimization, the bug report creation could be crashing because the module is not in the list of done modules yet. Fixed in 1.9.7 already.

  • Python2: Fix, unittest.mock was not yet available, code attempting to use it was crashing the compilation. Fixed in 1.9.7 already.

  • Accelerated: Fix, tensorflow configuration removing site usage needs to apply only to standalone mode. Fixed in 1.9.7 already.

  • Plugins: Fix, the get_dist_name Nuitka package configuration function could crash in some rare configurations. Fixed in 1.9.7 already.

  • Standalone: Added necessary data file for pygame package. Added in 1.9.7 already.

  • Standalone: Fix, was not properly handling standard library overloading module names for decisions. Inclusion and compilation mode were made as if the module was part of the standard library, rather than user code. This is now properly checking if it’s also an actual standard library module.

  • Plugins: Fix, crashing on missing absence message with no UPX binary was found.

  • Windows: Fix, couldn’t load extension modules from UNC paths, so standalone distributions failed to launch from network drives. This now works again and was a regression from adding support for symlinks on Windows.

  • Standalone: Added support for non-legacy pillow in imageio package.

  • Standalone: Added required easyOCR data file.

  • Nuitka-Python: Fix, do not demote to non-LTO for “too many” modules there in the default auto mode, it doesn’t work without it.

  • Fix, python setup.py install could fail. Apparently it tries to lookup Nuitka during installation, which then could fail, due to hacks we due to make sure wheels are platform dependent. That hack is of course not really needed for install, since no collision is going to happen there.

  • macOS: Fix, the standard matplotlib plugin that uses native UI was not included yet, and it was also not working due to bindings requiring uncompiled functions, which is now worked around.

  • Compatibility: Add back PySide6 workaround for overloading names like update with slots.

  • Standalone: Added geopandas data files.

  • Python2: Fix, code objects must be made from str exactly, unicode however was used in some configurations after recent improvements to the run time path handling.

  • Standalone: Added missing data files for boto, the predecessor of boto3 as well.

  • Standalone: Added missing DLL for tensorflow factorization module.

  • Compatibility: Fix, PySide2 and PySide6 signal disconnection without arguments were not working yet.

  • Standalone: Added support for toga.

  • Scons: Fix, need to Avoid picking up clang from PATH on Windows with --clang provided, as only our winlibs version is really working.

  • Fix, version of setuptools when included (which we try to avoid very much) was None which breaks some users of it, now it’s the correct version so checks of e.g. setuptools_scm can succeed.

  • Fix, icon options for platforms were conflated, so what should be windows only icon could get used on other platforms as well.

  • Fix, could not create compiled methods from compiled methods. Also now errors out for invalid types given properly.

New Features

  • Plugins: Added support for module decisions, these are parameters provided by the user which can be used to influence the Nuitka per package configuration with a new get_parameter function. We are using these to control important choices in the user, sometimes warning it to make that decision, if the default can be considered problematic.

  • Plugins: Added support for variables in Nuitka package configurations. We can now query at compile time, values from installed packages and use them, e.g. to know what backend is to be used.

  • Standalone: Added module decision to disable Torch JIT. This is generally the right idea, but the decision is still asked for since some packages and programs want to do Torch Tracing, and that is then disabled as well. This makes a bunch of transformers programs work.

  • Standalone: Added module decision to disable Numba JIT. This makes numba work in some cases, but not all. Some packages go very deep with JIT integration, but simpler uses will now compile.

  • New option --include-onefile-external-data allows you to specify file patterns that you included by other data files others, but to put those files not inside, but on the outside of the onefile binary. This makes it easier to create deployments fully within Nuitka project configuration, and to change your mind back and forth without adding/removing the data file option.

  • macOS: Added new value auto for detecting signing identity, if only one is available in the system.

  • macOS: Added support for --copyright and --trademark information to be in app bundles as well, this was previously Windows only.

  • Windows: Added support for using junctions in the Python environment, these are used e.g. when installing via scoop. Added in 1.9.2 already.

  • Added option --cf-protection to select the control flow protection mode for the GCC compiler and deviate from default values of some environments to less strict values.

  • Reports: Added output filename to report, mainly intended for automatically locating the compilation result independent of options used.

  • Plugins: Now provides a checksum for yaml files, but not yet verifies them at runtime, to ask the user to run the checker tool to update it when they make modifications.

  • Windows: Detect when we create too large compiled executables. There is a limit of 2GB that you might e.g. violate by attempting to embed very large files. This doesn’t cover onefile yet.

  • Watch: The tool can now create PRs with the changes in Nuitka-Watch for merging, this is for using it in the CI.

  • Watch: Scanning for Python versions now requires pipenv to be installed in them to be found.

  • Watch: Added ability to create branch and PR from watch run results.

  • Plugins: Added overridden-environment-variables feature to package configuration. These are environment variable changes that only last during the import of that module and are undone later.

  • Plugins: Added force-environment-variables feature to package configuration. These are environment variable changes done on module import that are not undone.

  • Nuitka-Action: Nuitka options that can be given multiple times, cannot be specified multiple times in your workflow. As a workaround, Nuitka now allows in Actions, to use new lines as separator. This is best done with this kind of quoting a multiline string.

    include-data-dir: |
       a=b
       c=d
    
  • The Nuitka package configuration no-auto-follow now applies recursively, i.e. that a top level package can have it, and not every sub-package that uses a package but should not be automatically followed, does have to say this. With this e.g. networkx configuration became simpler, and yet covered automatically older versions as well, and future changes too.

  • Windows: Added support for compiling in case sensitive folders. When this option is enabled, using os.path.normcase can make filenames not found, so with a few cleanups, for lazy code that wasn’t really using the APIs designed for comparisons and filename suffix testing, this works now better.

  • The __compiled__ value has a new attribute containing_dir that allows to find where a module, accelerate executable, a standalone dist folder, a macOS app bundle, or the onefile binary lives in a consistent fashion. This allows esp. better use than sys.argv[0] which points deep into the .app bundle, and can be used cross platform.

Optimization

  • Scalability: Avoid variables that are not shared to be treated as if they were, marking their type shape as tshape_unknown in the first micro pass. These micro passes are not visible, but basically constitute a full visit of the module tree over and over, until no more optimization is changing it. This can lead to quicker resolution, as that unknown type shape effectively disallowed all optimization for variables and reduce the number of necessary micro passes by one.

  • Escaped variables did provide a type shape tshape_unknown and while a lot of optimization looks for value knowledge, and gets by the escaped nature of the value, sometimes, this was seriously inhibiting some of the type based optimization.

  • Loop type shape analysis now succeeds in detecting the types for this code example, which is sort of a break-through for future performance enhancements in generated code.

    # Initial the value of "i" is "NUITKA_NINT_UNASSIGNED" in its
    # indicator part. The C compiler will remove that assignment
    # as it's only checked in the assignment coming up.
    i = 0
    # Assignment from a constant, produces a value where both the C
    # and the object value are value. This is indicated by a value
    # of "NUITKA_NINT_BOTH_VALID". The code generation will assign
    # both the object member from a prepared value, and the clong
    # member to 0.
    
    # For the conditional check, "NUITKA_NINT_CLONG_VALID" will
    # always be set, and therefore function will resort to comparing
    # that clong member against 9 simply, that will always be very
    # fast. Depending on how well the C compiler can tell if an overflow
    # can even occur, such that an object might get created, it can even
    # optimize that statically. In this case it probably could, but we
    # do not rely on that to be fast.
    while i < 9:  # RICH_COMPARE_LT_CBOOL_NINT_CLONG
       # Here, we might change the type of the object. In Python2,
       # this can change from ``int`` to ``long``, and our type
       # analysis tells us that. We can consider another thing,
       # not "NINT", but "NINTLONG" or so, to special case that
       # code. We ignore Python2 here, but multiple possible types
       # will be an issue, e.g. list or tuple, float or complex.
       # So this calls a function, that returns a value of type
       # "NINT" (actually it will become an in-place operation
       # but lets ignore that too).
       # That function is "BINARY_OPERATION_ADD_NINT_NINT_CLONG"(i, 1)
       # and it is going to check if the CLONG is valid, add the one,
       # and set to result to a new int. It will reset the
       # "NUITKA_NINT_OBJECT_VALID" flag, since the object will not be
       # bothered to create.
       i = i + 1
    
    # Since "NUITKA_INT_OBJECT_VALID" not given, need to create the
    # PyObject and return it.
    return i
    
  • Python3.11+: Use tomllib from standard library for our distutils integration into pyproject based builds.

  • Avoid late specialization for None returns in generators and do it during tree building already, to remove noise.

  • Added successful detection of static libpython for self compiled Python Linux and macOS. This makes it work with pyenv as well.

  • Standalone: Avoid including .pyx files when scanning for data files, these are code files too, in this case source files that are definitely unused most of the time.

  • macOS: Make static libpython default with CPython for more compact standalone distribution and faster binaries.

  • Remove non-existent entries from sys.path, avoiding many file system lookups during import scans.

  • Anti-Bloat: Avoid using triton in torch package in more cases. Added in 1.9.2 already.

  • Anti-Bloat: Avoid using pytest in knetworkx package in more cases. Added in 1.9.2 already.

  • Anti-Bloat: Avoid using IPython in distributed package. Added in 1.9.3 already.

  • Anti-Bloat: Avoid using dask in skimage. Added in 1.9.3 already.

  • Anti-Bloat: Avoid using triton in the bitsandbytes package. Added in 1.9.3 already.

  • Anti-Bloat: Avoid IPython in tf_keras package as well. Added in 1.9.6 already.

  • Anti-Bloat: Avoid unittest in mock.mock module. Added in 1.9.7 already.

  • Avoid importing setuptools_scm during compilation when using the tqdm inline copy, this also avoids a warning on Ubuntu. Added in 1.9.7 already.

  • Anti-Bloat: Avoid doctest in skimage in their tifffile inline copy as well. Added in 1.9.7 already.

  • Anti-Bloat: Avoid h5py.tests with older h5py as well. Added in 1.9.7 already.

  • Anti-Bloat: Using distributed.utils_test is also considered using pytest.

  • Anti-Bloat: Avoid IPython in the pip package.

  • Anti-Bloat: Avoid site module for older tensorflow versions too.

  • Anti-Bloat: Avoid more unittest usages in tensorflow packages.

  • Anti-Bloat: Avoid nose in skimage package.

  • Anti-Bloat: Avoid nose in networkx package.

  • Anti-Bloat: Avoid nose in pywt package.

Organisational

  • UI: Change template paths over from %VAR% to {VAR}.

    The old spec values are migrated transparently and continue to work, but get a warning when used.

    The new code detects unknown variable names and more formatting issues than before.

    Using only the {PID} value for process ID, is now making it temporary value for onefile, that was previously a bug.

    The main benefit and reason of doing this, is that Windows CMD.EXE does expand those values before Nuitka sees them as even with quoting %TEMP% is the current one on the building machine, a recipe for disaster. As some people still use that, and e.g. os.system or subprocess with shell=True will use it too, this is just not sustainable for a good user experience.

    As a result, compile time and run time variables now clash, there is e.g. {VERSION} (program version information given) and {Version} (Nuitka version), and we should clean that up too.

  • Project: Added Code of Conduct. Adapted from the one used in the Linux kernel.

  • UI: Warnings given by Nuitka used to be in red color, changed those to be yellow for consistency.

  • User Manual: Added pointer for Nuitka-Action Nuitka-Action for users interested in using Nuitka in GitHub workflows.

  • Added .gitignore to build folder that just causes these folders to be ignored by git.

  • User Manual: Added information on how to debug fork bombs from created binaries.

  • Debugging: The output of --experimental=--report-refcounts that we use to show leaks of compiled time objects at program exit, now counts and reports on functions, generator objects and compiled cells as well.

  • Quality: Warnings from yamllint not disabled are errors. These were only output, but didn’t cause the autoformat to error exit yet.

  • UI: Enhanced formatting of info traces, drop the :INFO part that shouts, and reserve that for errors and warnings. Also format info messages to make sure they fit into the line.

  • UI: Changed --show-source-changes to accept module pattern to make it easier to only see the ones currently being worked on. To get the old behavior of showing everything, use * as a pattern.

  • UI: Allow using ~ in data files source path for command line options and expand it properly.

  • Quality: Enhanced schema for our package configuration yaml files to detect suffixes with leading dots, that is not wanted. These now fail checks, but we also tolerate them now.

  • Quality: Check module names used in the package configuration yaml files for validity, this catches e.g. trailing dots.

  • Quality: Make sure to really prefer clang-format from Visual Code and MSVC for formatting C code, otherwise a system installed one could be used that gives slightly different outputs.

  • Scons: Allow disabling to enforce no warnings for C compilation

    Currently only for gcc, where we need it until loop tracing is better, we can now use --experimental=allow-c-warnings options to make --debug work for some known currently unavoidable warnings.

  • macOS: Make --macos-create-app-bundle imply standalone mode, it’s not working or useful for accelerated mode anyway.

  • Standalone: Added support for using self-compiled Python versions that are not installed on Linux and macOS. This avoids having to do make install and can ease debugging with changes made in Python core itself. Added in 1.9.6 already.

  • Release: Added ability to simple re-date hotfixes. Previously the version bump commit needed to be dropped, now a fixup commit is easy to generate.

  • Release: Man pages are no longer built during package builds, but are available statically in the git, which should make it easier.

  • Release: Disable verbose output in package installation of Nuitka, it never was any use, and just makes things hard to read.

  • UI: Check user yaml file present immediately. Otherwise it was crashing when parsing yaml files first time with less comprehensible exceptions. Added in 1.9.7 already.

  • Quality: Updated to latest rstfmt, black and isort versions.

  • Debian: Remove references to PDF documentation that no longer exists.

  • Quality: Do not crash when collecting modified files due to deleted files.

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

  • UI: Detect manylinux Pythons as a Python flavors as well.

  • UI: Detect self compiled uninstalled Python as a dedicated flavor.

Cleanups

  • For the Nuitka-Action part of the available options is now generated from Nuitka option definitions itself, adding some previously missing options as a result. As a result, adding --include-onefile-external-data was automatic this time.

  • The warnings for onefile only options without onefile mode provided have been moved to common code, and in some cases were having wrong texts corrected.

  • Use enum definitions in the Nuitka package configuration schema rather than manual oneOf types.

  • The User Manual was proof read and had a bunch of wordings improved.

  • Cleanup, avoid “unused but set variable” warning from the C compiler for hard some forms of hard imports.

  • Prefer os.getenv over os.environ.get for readability.

  • Changed parts of the C codes that clang-format had a hard time with to something more normal.

Tests

  • When locating the standalone binary created, use a compilation report and resolve the path specified there. This allows macOS app bundles to be used in these tests as well.

  • Made the PyQt tests executable on macOS too adding necessary options.

  • Added reference test case for unpacking into a list, this was not covered but under suspect of reference leaking which turns out to be wrong.

  • Much enhanced usage of virtualenv in the distutils test cases. We make more sure to delete them even in case of issues. We disable warnings during Nuitka package installation. The code to execute a case was factored out and became more clear. We now handle errors in execution with stating what case actually failed, this was a bit hard to tell previously. Also do not install Nuitka when a pyproject case is used, since the build tool installs Nuitka itself.

Summary

This release deserves the 2.0 marker, as it is ground breaking in many ways. The loop type analysis stands out on the optimization front. This will open an avenue for much optimized code at least for some benchmark examples this summer.

The new features for package configuration, demonstrate abilities to avoid plugins for Nuitka, where those previously would have been used. The new variables and parameters made it unnecessary to have them, and still add compile time variable use and user decisions and information, without them.

The scope of supported Python configurations got expanded a bit, and the the usual slew of anti-bloat work and new packages supported, makes Nuitka an ever more round package.

The improved user dialog with less noisy messages and slightly better coloring, continues a trend, where Nuitka becomes more and more easy to use.