Current Release

Release Information Hub

In this document, we track the per-version changes and comments for 2.4 down to Nuitka 2.0 release.

Nuitka Release 2.4 

This release largely contains bug fixes for the previous changes, but also finishes full compatibility with the match statements of 3.10, something that was long overdue since there were always some incompatible behaviors there.

In terms of bug fixes, it’s also huge. An upgrade is required, especially for new setuptools that made compiled programs segfault at startup.

Bug Fixes 

UI: Fix, we had reversed disable / force and wrong option name recommendation for --windows-console-mode when the user used old-style options.
Python3.10+: Fix, must not check for len greater or equal of 0 or for sequence match cases. That is unnecessary and incompatible and can raise exceptions with custom sequences not implementing __len__. Fixed in 2.3.1 already.
Python3.10+: Fix, match sequence with final star arguments failed in some cases to capture the rest. The assigned value then was empty.when it shouldn’t have been. Fixed in 2.3.1 already.
Python3.8+: Fix, calls to variable args functions now need to be done differently, or else they can crash, as was observed with 3.10 in PGO instrumentation, at least. Fixed in 2.3.1 already.
PGO: Fix, using nuitka-run did not execute the program created as expected. Fixed in 2.3.1 already.
Linux: Support extension modules used as DLLs by other DLLs or extension modules. That makes newer tensorflow and potentially more packages work again. Fixed in 2.3.1 already.
Python3.10+: Matches classes were not fully compatible.

We need to check against case-defined class __match_args__, not the matched value type __match_args that is not necessarily the same.

Also, properly annotating the exception exit of subscript matches; the subscript value can indeed raise an exception.

Collect keyword and positional match values in one go and detect duplicate attributes used, which we previously did not.
Scons: Fix, do not crash when clang is not reporting its version correctly. It happened if Clang usage was required with --clang option but not installed. Fixed in 2.3.2 already.
Debian: Fix, detecting the Debian flavor of Python was not working anymore, and as a result, the intended defaults were no longer applied by Nuitka, leading to incorrect suggestions that didn’t work. Fixed in 2.3.3 already.
Ubuntu: Fix, the static link library for Python 3.12 is not usable unless we provide parts of HACL for the sha2 module so as not to cause link errors. Fixed in 2.3.3 already.
Standalone: Fix, importing newer pkg_resources was crashing. Fixed in 2.3.3 already.
Python3.11+: Added support for newer Python with dill-compat. Fixed in 2.3.4 already.
Standalone: Support locating Windows icons for pywebview. Fixed in 2.3.4 already.
Standalone: Added support for spacy related packages. Fixed in 2.3.4 already.
Python3.12: Fix, our workaround for cv2 support cannot use the imp module anymore. Fixed in 2.3.4 already.
Compatibility: Added support for __init__ files that are extension modules. Architecture checks for macOS were false negatives for them, and the case insensitive import scan failed to find them on Windows. Fixed in 2.3.4 already.
Standalone: Added missing dependencies for standard library extension modules, mainly exhibited on macOS. Fixed in 2.3.4 already.
Windows: Fix build failures on mapped network drives. Fixed in 2.3.4 already.
Python3.12: Fix, need to set frame prev_inst or else f_lasti is random. Some packages; for example PySide6; use this to check what bytecode calls them or how they import them and it could crash when attempting it. Fixed in 2.3.6 already.
Fix, fork bomb in cpuinfo package no longer happens. Fixed in 2.3.8 already.
Nuitka-Python: Fix, cannot ask for shared library prefixes. Fixed in 2.3.8 already.
Standalone: Make sure keras package dependency for tensorflow is visible. Fixed in 2.3.10 already.
Linux: Fix, for static executables we should ignore errors setting a DLL load path. Fixed in 2.3.10 already.
Compatibility: Fix, nuitka resource readers also need to have .parent attribute. Fixed in 2.3.10 already.
Fix, need to force no-locale language outputs for tools outputs on non-Windows. Our previous methods were not forcing enough.

For non-Windows this makes Nuitka work on systems with locales active for message outputs only. Fixed in 2.3.10 already.
Fix, was not using proper result value for SET_ATTRIBUTE to check success in a few corner cases. Fixed in 2.3.10 already.
Windows: Retry deleting dist and build folders, allowing users to recognize still running programs and not crashing on Anti-Virus software still locking parts of them.
Fix, dict.fromkeys didn’t give compatible error messages for no args given.
Fix, output correct unsupported exception messages for in-place operations

For in-place **, it was also incompatible, since it must not mention the pow function.
Fix, included metadata could lead to instable code generation. We were using a dictionary for it, but that is not as stable order for the C compiler to fully benefit.
Fix, including data files for packages that are extension modules was not working yet.
macOS: Detect the DLL path of libpython (if used) by looking at dependencies of the running Python binary rather than encoding what CPython does. Doing that covers other Python flavors as well.
Fix, need to prefer extension modules over Python code for packages.
Fix, immutable constant values are not to be treated as very trusted.
Python3: Fix, the __loader__ attribute of a module should be an object and not only the class, otherwise only static methods can work.
Python3: Added .name and .path attributes to Nuitka loader objects for enhanced compatibility with code that expects source code loaders.
Fix, the sys.argv[0] needs to be absolute for best usability.

For dirname(sys.argv[0]) to be usable even if the program is launched via PATH environment by a shell, we cannot rely on how we are launched since that won’t be a good path, unlike with Python interpreter, where it always is.
Standalone: Fix, adding missing dependencies for some crypto packages.
Python3.12: Need to write to thread local variable during import. This however doesn’t work for Windows and non-static libpython flavors in general.
macOS: Enforce using system codesign as the Anaconda one is not working for us.
Fix, we need to read .pyi files as source code. Otherwise unicode characters can cause crashes.
Standalone: Fix, some packages query private values for distribution objects, so use the same attribute name for the path.
Multidist: Make sure to follow the multidist reformulation modules. Otherwise in accelerated mode, these could end up not being included.
Fix, need to hold a reference of the iterable while converting it to list.
Plugins: Fix, this wasn’t properly ignoring None values in load descriptions as intended.
macOS: Need to allow DLLs from all Homebrew paths.
Reports: Do not crash during report writing for very early errors.
Python3.11+: Fix, need to make sure we have split as a constant value when using exception groups.
Debian: More robust against problematic distribution folders with no metadata, these apparently can happen with OS upgrades.
Fix, was leaking exception in case of --python-flag=-m mode that could cause errors.
Compatibility: Close standard file handles on process forks as CPython does. This should enhance things for compilations using attach on Windows.

Package Support 

Standalone: Added data file for older bokeh version. Fixed in 2.3.1 already.
Standalone: Support older pandas versions as well.
Standalone: Added data files for panel package.
Standalone: Added support for the newer kivy version and added macOS support as well. Fixed in 2.3.4 already.
Standalone: Include all kivy.uix packages with kivy, so their typical config driven usage is not too hard.
Standalone: Added implicit dependencies of lxml.sax module. Fixed in 2.3.4 already.
Standalone: Added implicit dependencies for zeroconf package. Fixed in 2.3.4 already.
Standalone: Added support for numpy version 2. Fixed in 2.3.7 already.
Standalone: More complete support for tables package. Fixed in 2.3.8 already.
Standalone: Added implicit dependencies for scipy.signal package. Fixed in 2.3.8 already.
Standalone: Added support for moviepy and imageio_ffmeg packages. Fixed in 2.3.8 already.
Standalone: Added support for newer scipy. Fixed in 2.3.10 already.
Standalone: Added data files for bpy package. For full support more work will be needed.
Standalone: Added support for nes_py and gym_tetris packages.
Standalone: Added support for dash and plotly.
Standalone: Added support for usb1 package.
Standalone: Added support for azure.cognitiveservices.speech package.
Standalone: Added implicit dependencies for tinycudann package.
Standalone: Added support for newer win32com.server.register.
Standalone: Added support for jaxtyping package.
Standalone: Added support for open3d package.
Standalone: Added workaround for torch submodule import function.
Standalone: Added support for newer paddleocr.

New Features 

Experimental support for Python 3.13 beta 3. We try to follow its release cycle closely and aim to support it at the time of CPython release. We also detect no-GIL Python and can make use of it. The GIL status is output in the --version format and the GIL usage is available as a new {GIL} variable for project options.
Scons: Added experimental option --experimental=force-system-scons to enforce system Scons to be used. That allows for the non-use of inline copy, which can be interesting for experiments with newer Scons releases. Added in 2.3.2 already.
Debugging: A new non-deployment handler helps when segmentation faults occurred. The crashing program then outputs a message pointing to a page with helpful information unless the deployment mode is active.
Begin merging changes for WASI support. Parts of the C changes were merged and for other parts, command line option --target=wasi was added, and we are starting to address cross platform compilation for it. More work will be necessary to fully merge it, right not it doesn’t work at all yet.
PGO: Added support for using it in standalone mode as well, so once we use it more, it will immediately be practical.
Make the --list-package-dlls use plugins as well, and make delvewheel and announce its DLL path internally, too. Listing DLLs for packages using plugins can use these paths for more complete outputs.
Plugins: The no-qt plugin was usable in accelerated mode.
Reports: Added included metadata and reasons for it.
Standalone: Added support for spacy with a new plugin.
Compatibility: Use existing source files as if they were .pyi files for extension modules. That gives us dependencies for code that installs source code and extension modules.
Plugins: Make version information, onefile mode, and onefile cached mode indication available in Nuitka Package Configuration, too.
Onefile: Warn about using tendo.singleton in non-cached onefile mode.

Tendo uses the running binary name for locking by default. So it’s not going to work if that changes for each execution, make the user aware of that, so they can use cached mode instead.
Reports: Include the micro pass counts and tracing merge statistics so we can see the impact of new optimization.
Plugins: Allow to specify modes in the Nuitka Package Configuration for annotations, doc_strings, and asserts. These overrule global configuration, which is often not practical. Some modules may require annotations, but for other packages, we will know they are fine without them. Simply disabling annotations globally barely works. For some modules, removing annotations can give a 30% compile-time speedup.
Standalone: Added module configuration for Django to find commands and load its engine.
Allow negative values for –jobs to be relative to the system core count so that you can tell Nuitka to use all but two cores with --jobs=-2 and need not hardcode your current code count.
Python3.12: Annotate libraries that are currently not supported

We will need to provide our own Python3.12 variant to make them work.
Python3.11+: Catch calls to uncompiled function objects with compiled code objects. We now raise a RuntimeError in the bytecode making it easier to catch them rather than segfaulting.

Optimization 

Statically optimize constant subscripts of variables with immutable constant values.
Forward propagate very trusted values for variable references enabling a lot more optimization.
Python3.8+: Calls of C functions are faster and more compact code using vector calls, too.
Python3.10+: Mark our compiled types as immutable.
Python3.12: Constant returning functions are dealing with immortal values only. Makes their usage slightly faster since no reference count handling is needed.
Python3.10+: Faster attribute descriptor lookups. Have our own replacement of PyDesc_IsData that had become an API call, making it very slow on Windows specifically.
Avoid using Python API function for determining sequence sizes when getting a length size for list creations.
Data Composer: More compact and portable Python3 int (Python2 long) value representation.

Rather than fixed native length 8 or 4 bytes, we use variable length encoding which for small values uses only a single byte.

This also avoids using struct.pack with C types, as we might be doing cross platform, so this makes part of the WASI changes unnecessary at the same time.

Large values are also more compact because middle 31-bit portions can be less than 4 bytes and save space on average.
Data Composer: Store bytecode blob size more efficient and portable, too.
Prepare having knowledge of __prepare__ result to be dictionaries per compile time decisions.
Added more hard trust for the typing module.

The typing.Text is a constant too. In debug mode, we now check all exports of typing for constant values. This will allow to find missing values sooner in the future.

Added the other types to be known to exist. That should help scalability for types intensive code somewhat by removing error handling for them.
macOS: Should use static libpython with Anaconda as it works there too, and reduces issues with Python3.12 and extension module imports.
Standalone: Statically optimize by OS in sysconfig.

Consequently, standalone distributions can exclude OS-specific packages such as _aix_support and _osx_support.
Avoid changing code names for complex call helpers

The numbering of complex call helper as normally applied to all functions are, caused this issue. When part of the code is used from the bytecode cache, they never come to exist and the C code of modules using them then didn’t match.

This avoids an extra C re-compilation for some modules that were using renumbered function the second time around a compilation happens. Added in 2.3.10 already.
Avoid using C-API when creating __path__ value.
Faster indentation of generated code.

Anti-Bloat 

Add new pydoc bloat mode to trigger warnings when using it.
Recognize usage of numpy.distutils as setuptools bloat for more direct reporting.
Avoid compiling large opcua modules that generate huge C files much like asyncua package. Added in 2.3.1 already.
Avoid shiboken2 and shiboken6 modules from matplotlib package when the no-qt plugin is used. Added in 2.3.6 already.
Changes for not using pydoc and distutils in numpy version 2. Added in 2.3.7 already.
Avoid numpy and packaging dependencies from PIL package.
Avoid using webbrowser module from pydoc.
Avoid using unittest in keras package. Added in 2.3.1 already.
Avoid distutils from _oxs_support (used by sysconfig) module on macOS.
Avoid using pydoc for werkzeug package. Fixed in 2.3.10 already.
Avoid using pydoc for site module. Fixed in 2.3.10 already.
Avoid pydoc from xmlrpc.server. Fixed in 2.3.10 already.
Added no_docstrings support for numpy2 as well. Fixed in 2.3.10 already.
Avoid pydoc in joblib.memory.
Avoid setuptools in gsplat package.
Avoid dask and jax in scipy package.
Avoid using matplotlib for networkx package.

Organizational 

Python3.12: Added annotations of official support for Nuitka PyPI package and test runner options that were still missing. Fixed in 2.3.1 already.
UI: Change runner scripts. The nuitka3 is no more. Instead, we have nuitka2 where it applies. Also, we now use CMD files rather than batch files.
UI: Check filenames for data files for illegal paths on the respective platforms. Some user errors with data file options become more apparent this way.
UI: Check spec paths more for illegal paths as well. Also do not accept system paths like {TEMP} and no path separator after it.
UI: Handle report writing interrupt with CTRL-C more gracefully. No need to present this this as a general problem, rather inform the user that he did it.
NoGIL: Warn if using a no-GIL Python version, as this mode is not yet officially supported by Nuitka.
Added badges to the README.rst of Nuitka to display package support and more. Added in 2.3.1 already.
UI: Use the retry decorator when removing directories in general. It will be more thorough with properly annotated retries on Windows. For the dist folder, mention the running program as a probable cause.
Quality: Check replacements and replacements_plain Nuitka package configuration values.
Quality: Catch backlashes in paths provided in Nuitka Package Configuration values for dest_path, relative_path, dirs, raw_dirs and empty_dirs.
Debugging: Disable pagination in gdb with the --debugger option.
PGO: Warn if the PGO binary does not run successfully.
UI: The new console mode option is a Windows-specific option now, move it to that group.
UI: Detect “rye python” on macOS. Added in 2.3.8 already.
UI: Be forgiving about release candidates; Ubuntu shipped one in a LTS release. Changed in 2.3.8 already.
Debugging: Allow fine-grained debug control for immortal checks

Can use --no-debug-immortal-assumptions to allow for corrupted immortal objects, which might be done by non-Nuitka code and then break the debug mode.
UI: Avoid leaking compile time Nuitka environment variables to the child processes.

They were primarily visible with --run, but we should avoid it for everything.

For non-Windows, we now recognize if we are the exact re-execution and otherwise, reject them.
Watch: Delete the existing virtualenv in case of errors updating or upgrading it.
Watch: Keep track of Nuitka compiled program exit code in newly added result files, too.
Watch: Redo compilations in case of previous errors when executing the compile program.
Quality: Wasn’t detecting files to ignore for PyLint on Windows properly, also detect crashes of PyLint.

Tests 

Added test to cover the dill-compat plugin.
macOS: Make actual use of ctypes in its standalone test to ensure correctness on that OS, too.
Make compile extension module test work on macOS, too.
Avoid using 2to3 in our tests since newer Python no longer contains it by default, we split up tests with mixed contents into two tests instead.
Python3.11+: Make large constants test executable for as well. We no longer can easily create those values on the fly and output them due to security enhancements.
Python3.3: Remove support from the test runner as well.
Tests: Added construct-based tests for coroutines so we can compare their performance as well.

Cleanups 

Make try/finally variable releases through common code. It will allow us to apply special exception value trace handling for only those for scalability improvements, while also making many re-formulations simpler.
Avoid using anti-bloat configuration values replacements where replacements_plain is good enough. A lot of config pre-date its addition.
Avoid Python3 and Python3.5+ specific Jinja2 modules on versions before that, and consequently, avoid warning about the SyntaxError given.
Moved code object extraction of dill-compat plugin from Python module template to C code helper for shared usage and better editing.
Also call va_end for standards compliance when using va_start. Some C compilers may need that, so we better do it even if what we have seen so far doesn’t need it.
Don’t pass main filename to the tree building anymore, and make nuitka.Options functions usage explicit when importing.
Change comments that still mentioned Python 3.3 as where a change in Python happened since we no longer support this version. Now, we consider what’s first seen in Python 3.4 is a Python3 change.
Cleanup, change Python 3.4 checks to 3.0 checks as Python3.3 is no longer supported. Cleans up version checks, as we now treat >=3.4 either as >=3 or can drop checks entirely.
The usual flow of spelling cleanups, this time for C codes.

Summary 

This release cycle was a longer than usual, with much new optimization and package support requiring attention.

For optimization we got quite a few things going, esp. with more forward propagation, but the big ones for scalability are still all queued up and things are only prepared.

The 3.13 work was continuing smoothly and seems to be doing fine. We are still on track for supporting it right after release.

The parts where we try and address WASI prepare cross-compilation, but we will not aim at it generally immediately, and target our own Nuitka standalone backend Python that is supposed to be added in coming releases.

Nuitka Release 2.3 

This release bumps the long-awaited 3.12 support to a complete level. Now, Nuitka behaves identically to CPython 3.12 for the most part.

In terms of bug fixes, it’s also huge. Especially for Unicode paths and software with Unicode extension module names and Unicode program names, and even non-UTF8 code names, there have been massive amounts of improvements.

Bug Fixes 

Standalone: Added support for python-magic-bin package. Fixed in 2.2.1 already.
Fix: The cache directory creation could fail when multiple compilations started simultaneously. Fixed in 2.2.1 already.
macOS: For arm64 builds, DLLs can also have an architecture dependent suffix; check that as well. Makes the soundfile dependency scan work. Fixed in 2.2.1 already.
Fix: Modules where lazy loaders handling adds hard imports when a module is first processed did not affect the current module, potentially causing it not to resolve hidden imports. Fixed in 2.2.1 already.
macOS: The use of libomp in numba needs to cause the extension module not to be included and not to look elsewhere. Fixed in 2.2.1 already.
Python3.6+: Fix, added support for keyword arguments of ModuleNotFoundError. Fixed in 2.2.1 already.
macOS: Detect more versioned DLLs and arm64 specific filenames. Fixed in 2.2.1 already.
Fix, was not annotating exception exit when converting an import to a hard submodule import. Fixed in 2.2.2 already.
Fix, branches that became empty can still have traces that need to be merged.

Otherwise, usages outside the branch will not see propagated assignment statements. As a result, these falsely became unassigned instead. Fixed in 2.2.2 already.
Windows: Fix, uninstalled self-compiled Python didn’t have proper installation prefix added for DLL scan, resulting in runtime DLLs not picked up from there. Fixed in 2.2.2 already.
Standalone: Added support for newer PySide6 version 6.7. It needed correction on macOS and has a new data file type. Fixed in 2.2.3 already.
Standalone: Complete support for pyocd package. Fixed in 2.2.3 already.
Module: Fix, the created .pyi files were incomplete.

The list of imported modules created in the finalization step was incomplete, we now go over the actual done modules and mark all non-included modules as dependencies.
Scons: Fix, need to avoid using Unicode paths towards the linker on Windows. Instead, use a temporary output filename and rename it to the actual filename after Scons has completed.
Windows: Avoid passing Unicode paths to the dependency walker on Windows, as it cannot handle those. Also, the temporary filenames in the build folder must be in short paths, as it cannot handle them in case that is a Unicode path.
Scons: For ccache on Windows, the log filename must be a short path too, if the build folder is a Unicode path.
Windows: Make sure the Scons build executes inside a short path as well, so that a potential Unicode path is visible to the C compiler when resolving the current directory.
Windows: The encoding of Unicode paths for accelerated mode values of __file__ was not making sure that hex sequences were correctly terminated, so in some cases, it produced ambiguous C literals.
Windows: Execute binaries created with --windows-uac-admin with and --run options with proper UAC prompt.
Fix, need to allow for non-UTF8 Unicode in variable names, function names, class names, and method names.

Python3.10+: Fix, match statements that captured the rest of mapping checks were not working yet.

match value:
   case {"key1": 5, **rest}:
      ... # rest was not assigned here

Windows: When deleting build folders, make sure the retries leading to a complete deletion always.
Python2: Fix, could crash with non-unicode program paths on Windows.
Avoid giving SyntaxWarning from reading source code

For example, the standard site module of Python 3.12 gives warnings about illegal escape sequences that nobody cares about apparently.
Fix, the matplotlib warnings by options-nanny were still given even if the no-qt plugin was used, since the variable name referenced there was not actually set yet by that plugin.
Windows: Fix, when using the uninstalled self-compiled Python, we need python.exe to find DLL dependencies. Otherwise it doesn’t locate the MSVC runtime and Python DLL properly.
Standalone: Added support for freetype package.

New Features 

Support for Python 3.12 is finally there. We focused on scalability first and because we did things the correct way immediately, rather than rushing to get it working and improving only later.

As a result, the correctness and performance of Nuitka with previous Python releases are improved as well.

Some things got delayed, though. We need to do more work to take advantage of other core changes. Concerning exceptions normalized at creation time, the created module code doesn’t yet take advantage. Also, more efficient two-digit long handling is possible with Python 3.12, but not implemented. It will take more time before we have these changes completed.
Experimental support for Python 3.13 beta 1 is also there, and potentially surprising, but we will try and follow its release cycle closely and aim to support it at the time of release.

Nuitka has followed all of its core changes so far, and basic tests are passing; the accelerated, module, standalone, and onefile modes all work as expected. The only thing delayed is the uncompiled generator integration, where we need to replicate the exact CPython behavior. We need to have perfect integration only for working with the asyncio loop, so we wait with it until release candidates appear.
Plugins: Added support to include directories entirely unchanged by adding raw_dir values for data-files section, see Nuitka Package Configuration.
UI: The new command line option --include-raw-dir was added to allow including directories entirely unchanged.
Module: Added support for creating modules with Unicode names. Needs a different DLL entry function name and to make use of two-phase initialization for the created extension module.
Added support for OpenBSD standalone mode.

Optimization 

Python3: Avoid API calls for allocators

Most effective with Python 3.11 or higher but also many other types like bytes, dict keys, float, and list objects are faster to create with all Python3 versions.
Python3.5+: Directly use the Python allocator functions for object creation, avoiding the DLL API calls. The coverage is complete with Python3.11 or higher, but many object types like float, dict, list, bytes benefit even before that version.
Python3: Faster creation of StopIteration objects.

With Python 3.12, the object is created directly and set as the current exception without normalization checks.

We also added a new specialized function to create the exception object and populate it directly, avoiding the overhead of calling of the StopIteration type.
Python3.10+: When accessing freelists, we were not passing for tstate but locally getting the interpreter object, which can be slower by a few percent in some configurations. We now use the free lists more efficient with tuple, list, and dict objects.
Python3.8+: Call uncompiled functions via vector calls.

We avoid an API call that ends up being slower than using the same function via the vector call directly.
Python3.4+: Avoid using _PyObject_LengthHint API calls in list.extend and have our variant that is faster to call.
Added specialization for os.path.normpath. We might benefit from compile time analysis of it once we want to detect file accesses.
Avoid using module constants accessor for global constant values

For example, with (), we used the module-level accessor for no reason, as it is already available as a global value. As a result, constant blobs shrink, and the compiled code becomes slightly smaller , too.
Anti-Bloat: Avoid using dask from the sparse module. Added in 2.2.2 already.

Organizational 

UI: Major change in console handling.

Compiled programs on Windows now have a third mode, besides console or not. You can now create GUI applications that attach to an available console and output there.

The new option --console controls this and allows to enforce console with the force value and disable using it with the disable value, the attach value activates the new behavior.

Note

Redirection of outputs to a file in attach mode only works if it is launched correctly, for example, interactively in a shell, but some forms of invocation will not work; prominently, subprocess.call without inheritable outputs will still output to a terminal.

On macOS, the distinction doesn’t exist anymore; technically it wasn’t valid for a while already; you need to use bundles for non-console applications, though, by default otherwise a console is forced by macOS itself.
Detect patchelf usage in buggy version 0.18.0 and ask the user to upgrade or downgrade it, as this specific version is known to be broken.
UI: Make clear that the --nofollow-import-to option accepts patters.
UI: Added warning for module mode and usage of the options to force outputs as they don’t have any effect.
UI: Check the success of Scons in creating the expected binary immediately after running it and not only once we reach post-processing.
UI: Detect empty user package configuration files
UI: Do not output module ast when a plugin reports an error for the module, for example, a forbidden import.
Actions: Update from deprecated action versions to the latest versions.

Tests 

Use Nuitka Project Options for the user plugin test rather than passing by environment variables to the test runner.
Added a new search mode, skip, `` to complement ``resume which resumes right
after the last test resume stopped on. We can use that while support for a Python version is not complete.

Cleanups 

Solved a TODO about using unified code for setting the StopIteration, coroutines, generators, and asyncgen used to be different.
Unified how the binary result filename is passed to Scons for modules and executables to use the same result_exe key.

Summary 

This release marks a huge step in catching up with compatibility of Python. After being late with 3.12 support, we will now be early with 3.13 support if all goes well.

The many Unicode support related changes also enhanced Nuitka to generate 2 phase loading extension modules, which also will be needed for sub-interpreter support later on.

From here on, we need to re-visit compatibility. A few more obscured 3.10 features are missing, the 3.11 compatibility is not yet complete, and we need to take advantage of the new caching possibilities to enhance performance for example with attribute lookups to where it can be with the core changes there.

For the coming releases until 3.13 is released, we hope to focus on scalability a lot more and get a much needed big improvement there, and complete these other tasks on the side.

Nuitka Release 2.2 

This release focused on compatibility and significant optimization progress for loops, such as list operations within. The main line of change is to be able to support Python 3.12 in the next release.

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: Added platform linker option to be usable with their current Arch Python package. Fixed in 2.1.1 already.
Fix, ctypes.CDLL optimization used a misspelled argument name for use_last_error, such that keyword argument calls 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 was 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.
Standalone: Updated dotenv workaround for newer version. Fixed in 2.1.3 already.
Fix, PySide6 slots failed to be moved between threads. For that we need to make function renames visible in the owning class as well. Fixed in 2.1.3 already.
Standalone: Added support for win32com.server.register. Fixed in 2.1.3 already.
Standalone: Handle “string” import errors of uvicorn gracefully. Fixed in 2.1.3 already.
Fix, the dill-compat plugin needs also needs to expose the compiled type names as built-ins for the pickle module to find them.
Standalone: Added support for gruut package. Fixed in 2.1.3 already.
Standalone: Added support for newer toga to also include toga_winforms metadata. Fixed in 2.1.3 already.
Standalone: Added support for newer tensorflow package. Fixed in 2.1.4 already.
Standalone: Fix, matplotlib needs to emit a dependency on the backend to be included. Otherwise it could be missing at run-time in some cases. Fixed in 2.1.4 already.
Onefile: Respect XDG_CACHE_HOME variable on non-Windows platforms. Some users might configure that to not to be ~/.cache, respect that. Fixed in 2.1.4 already.
Python2: Some cases of list.insert were not properly handling all index types. Fixed in 2.1.4 already.
Fix, optimized list.remove failed to handle tuple arguments properly. Removing tuple values from lists could cause errors. Fixed in 2.1.4 already.
Standalone: Added missing implicit dependencies for pyarrow.datasets. Fixed in 2.1.4 already.
Standalone: Added support for dask.dataframe module. Fixed in 2.1.4 already.
Standalone: Added DLLs for tensorrt_libs package. Fixed in 2.1.4 already.
Standalone: Added missing metadata of numpy for xarray package. Fixed in 2.1.4 already.
Standalone: Added support for newer scipy. Fixed in 2.1.5 already.
Standalone: Fix, older gcc could give warning about C code to work with PYTHONPATH which caused build errors on older systems. Fixed in 2.1.5 already.
Fix, locals representing nodes could not be cloned, and as a result, some code re-formulations failed to compile in try constructs. Fixed in 2.1.5 already.
Standalone: Added data files for names package. Fixed in 2.1.5 already.
Standalone: Added data files for randomname package. Fixed in 2.1.5 already.
Standalone: Fix, the standalone standard library scan was not fully ignoring git folders, subfolders were still looked at and could cause issues. Fixed in 2.1.5 already.
Standalone: Added support for newer transformers. Fixed in 2.1.5 already.
Standalone: Add support for newer bitsandbytes. Fixed in 2.1.5 already.
Scons: Fix, when locating binaries, do not use directories but only files.

A directory on PATH that was named gcc could be mistaken to be a gcc binary causing errors. Fixed in 2.1.6 already.
Windows: Fix, by default, scan only for .bin and .exe binaries for Nuitka Package Configuration EXE dependency patterns. This was the intended value, but it had not taken effect yet. Fixed in 2.1.6 already.
Fix, the __compiled__.containing_dir should be an absolute path. For it to be usable after a change of directory is done by the program that is required. Fixed in 2.1.6 already.
Standalone: Added support for more parts of networkx package. Fixed in 2.1.6 already.
Windows: Fix working with UNC paths and re-parse points at compile time.

Now Nuitka should work with mapped and even unmapped to drive paths like \\some-hostname\unc-test as they are common in some VM setups.
Windows: Make sure the download path is an external use path in scons as well, otherwise the home directory could be an unusable path for MinGW64, causing it not to find files.
Standalone: Added missing dependency of sspilib that prevented requests-ntlm from working on Windows.
Python3.5+: Add support for using dictionary un-packings in class declarations. That is a rarely used in actual Python code, but was found missing by tests recently.
Python3.11: Fix, code objects co_qualname attribute was not actually the qualified name, but the same as co_name only.
Anaconda: Fix, must not consider the Anaconda lib directory as a system directory, because then those DLLs that are not included.
Fix, cannot trust dynamic hard modules as much otherwise, huggingface_hub.utils.tqdm ended up being a module and not the class it’s supposed to be.
macOS: Fix, on newer macOS the libc++ and libz DLLs cannot be found anymore, we need to ignore that actively as our code insists on full resolution to catch bugs.
Fix, support for newer zaber_motion was not really working.
Standalone: Added required data files for pyviz_comms.
Standalone: Added required data files for panel package.
Standalone: Added required data files for bokeh package.
Standalone: Fixup scipy for Anaconda.
Fix, need to make parent module usages more explicit.

Otherwise, plugin mechanisms like no-follow from a parent module cannot affect its child modules, as they can end up being followed to only after them.
Fix, the dill-compat plugin in module mode cannot assume the main module name to be the one from compile time, need to look the actual one up at runtime.

New Features 

Added experimental support for Python 3.12, this is passing basic tests, but known to crash a lot at run-time still, you are recommended to use pre-releases of Nuitka, as official support is not going to happen before 2.3 release.
Standalone: Added support for tensorflow.function JIT

With preserved source code of decorated functions and we can provide it at run-time to tensorflow JIT so it can do its tracing executions.
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 the same way. Added in 2.1.1 already.
Added new kind of warning of plugin category and use it in the Nuitka Package Configuration to inform matplotlib users to select a GUI backend via plugin selection. Added in 2.1.4 already.
Zig: Added support for zig as CC value. Due to it not supporting C11 fully yet, we need to use the C++ workaround and cannot compile for Python 3.11 or higher yet.
For the __compiled__ value, we now have a __compiled__.main that is the name of the compiled module. For modules, Nuitka determines this at run time; in other modes, it is the name of the main module.

Optimization 

Use set specific API in contains tests, rather than generic sequence one.
Lower value in something tests for known set and list values to use frozenset and tuple respectively.
Recognize exact type shapes of loop variables where possible. This enables appends to list to be optimized to their dedicated nodes among other things, with those often being a lot faster than generic code. This speeds up e.g. list append tests by a significant amount.
Optimization: Have dedicated helper for list.remove, such that it is not using a Python DLL call where that is slow.
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.
Anti-Bloat: Avoid using setuptools in transformers package for more modules. Added in 2.1.3 already.
Anti-Bloat: Avoid testing packages for newer tensorflow package as well. Added in 2.1.4 already.
Optimization: Avoid recompiling azure package which is not performance relevant. Added in 2.1.4 already.
Avoid packages owned by Nuitka plugins in matploblib backends unless the corresponding plugin is actually active. Added in 2.1.4 already.
Anti-Bloat: Avoid setuptools in deepspeed package. Added in 2.1.4 already.
Anti-Bloat: Avoid setuptools in transformers package. Added in 2.1.4 already.
Anti-Bloat: Avoid scipy usage causing torch or cupy usage. Added in 2.1.4 already.
Anti-Bloat: Recognize keras testing modules as unittest bloat.
Faster code generation due to enhancements in how identifiers are cached for module names and the indentation codes.
Optimization: Handle no_docstrings issue for torio package.
Anti-Bloat: Avoid IPython from imgui_bundle package.
Anti-Bloat: Remove testing module usage when dask is used.
Anti-Bloat: Avoid unitest usage in tf_keras package as well.
Anti-Bloat: Avoid IPython from bokeh package.

Organizational 

UI: Catch conflicts between data files and EXE/DLLs/extension module filenames. Previously, you could overwrite binaries with data files, but that is now rejected as an explicit error.
Onefile: Avoid using the program name without suffix inside the dist folder, as that avoids collisions with data file directories of the same name, e.g., if the package and main binary have the same name, they would clash previously, but adding a .bin suffix to the binary avoids that entirely.
UI: Don’t force {VERSION} in specs to be resolved to four digits.

That made it hard for users, who will be surprised to see 1.0 become 1.0.0.0 when that is only needed for Windows version information really.
UI: Catch wrong values for --jobs value sooner, negative and non-integer values error exit immediately. Added in 2.1.1 already.
UI: Nicer usage name when invoked with python -m nuitka

The recommended form of invocation of Nuitka should not have an ugly invocation reference mentioning __main__.py instead put the python -m nuitka notion there.
UI: Reorder options for the plugins group to be more readable.
Plugins: Remove obsolete plugins from standard plugin documentation. Removed in 2.1.4 already.
UI: The Windows release was coming from the compiling Python and as such wrong, for example, Windows 11 always showed up as Windows 10, and some older versions of Python didn’t know Windows 10, yet, so this could be confusing in issue analysis.
UI: Do not warn about static libpython for Python debug mode compilation. It is misleading as often it doesn’t work for that configuration, and it’s only a distraction since debugging Python reference counts is not about performance. Changed in 2.1.4 already.
UI: Catch newlines in spec values. They break code C code generation potentially; they also are likely copy&paste mistakes that won’t do what the user expects. Added in 2.1.4 already.
Quality: Updated to the latest version of black.
Quality: Fix, isort and black can corrupt outputs, catch that.
Debugging: Generate Scons debug script

It can serve to quickly re-execute a Scons compilation without re-executing Nuitka again. This is best used where there is no Python level change but only C changes and no expectation of producing a usable result.

Because no post-processing is applied, and as a consequence this is not usable to produce binaries that work. In the future, we might expand this to be able to run post-processing still.
Debugging: Disabling all freelists is now honored for more code, tuples and empty dictionaries as well.
UI: Add macOS version to help output, which is sometimes vital for issue analysis.
Reports: Add the OS release to reports as well.
Reports: Exclude parent path imports from compilation reports for module usages that are found and end up not being excluded.
Watch: Reporting more problems, catching more errors, and adding the ability to create PRs from changes. However, it does not yet do it automatically.
Visual Code: Have plugins C files in the include path as well.

Tests 

Tests: Fix, cannot assume setuptools to be installed, some RPM based systems don’t have it.
Run commercial code signing test only on Windows.
Allow for standalone testing file access to the Azure agent folders. For tests on Azure, it’s like the home directory.
Make sure optimization tests are named to make it clear that they are tests.

Cleanups 

Remove useless --execute-with-pythonpath option, we don’t use that anymore at all.

Summary 

The JIT mechanism added for tensorflow should be possible to generalize and will be applied to other JITs, like numba and others in the future as well.

The road to Python 3.12 is not fully complete, but the end feels closer now, and the subsequent release hopefully will add the official support for it.

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.

Organizational 

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.

Organizational 

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.