09 December 2022
All in with Nuitka
After more than 10 years of working on the Python compiler Nuitka, and at the age of 50, I have finally decided to take the plunge. My projects “Nuitka” and “Nuitka commercial” are now my day job, and I quit my work in the Air Traffic Community, after working on ARTAS (a software to create an Air Situation Picture from radar and other sensors) for 20 years.
Why now?
That is very good question. I feel I could have done this a long time ago, and my heart was torn for a while, and also I prepared this for a while now. Listing back to interviews from 4 years ago, it seems though as if it had not been on the radar (pun intended).
So then I launched Nuitka commercial around 1.5 years ago, first as vapor ware, with early bird customers, and meanwhile it has matured to a point, where it is the obvious solution to many corporate users, with big guys picking it up and small business as well. From startups, big name technology giants, universities, mid sized companies, and from individuals, I have all kinds of support.
I liked my old job very much, but it was getting old, and I felt like Nuitka needs me to fulfil my mission. And my wife needed my help with driving her to work, which was getting the load to high, something had to give. And it seems nothing related to what is called Nuitka (my wife, and the compiler share the name) was going to be that.
What will change?
Already, ever since I launched Nuitka commercial, Nuitka has become way more of a out of the box experience. It just works, and covers more packages than ever before, and steps have been taken, to make it possible to extend this even further with your help. Sure there are still shortcoming.
But Nuitka has become very polished, and shows this very much that I also love details and doing things correctly. I have conducted Nuitka from day one as an attempt to create a software that would be usable to the enterprise with a million lines of code, that they cannot check for unsupported language features, so Nuitka is just fully compatible, to a level of absurdity.
Having conducted Nuitka on a level of where a corporate business can throw it’s code at Nuitka and have it just work, and reliably, this will only improve now.
Naturally bugs have happened once in a while, but I was always more careful. You know, like if this was for safety critical software, on which lives might depend. Hard to not be affected by that stance.
So lets talk about other ways I plan to expand.
Nuitka Package Configuration
Extending Nuitka with tweaks for package has become increasingly
simpler. Many previous plugins, e.g. for torch, tensorflow, and
most recently numpy, and definitely also the Qt binding ones in the
future, have been or will be converted to Yaml configuration applied by
generic plugins that deal with DLLs, data-files, tweaks (called
anti-bloat) etc.
Adding stuff there is simple, and as of recently, there is even
documentation for it. This is going to be explained in a series of posts
detailing Nuitka Package Configuration, under the package_config
tag.
I must say it’s so much fun, I love working with it. But the goal is for this to have you join it, and PRs are indeed starting to come in more frequently it seems from first glance, but I need to make this more known.
Streaming
I have experimented with streaming in the past, and I absolutely love it. Without my day job, effectively working two jobs at the same time, I expect to have the time to do more of them in December and then on a regular basis.
Python 3.11
There will be a separate post on this issue later this week. I am scrambling to add support for it and it feels very far already. Many basic tests already work, but more debugging will be needed. I hope Nuitka 1.3 will add support for it, at least on the usual experimental level.
How you can help?
Please become a subscriber of Nuitka commercial, even if you do not need the IP protection features it mostly has. All essential packaging and performance features are free, and I have put incredible amounts of works in this, and I need to now make a living off it.
Right now, I am far from being able to sustain my income from it, and I am taking a risk with this effort, hoping for support from you.
Nuitka commercial makes creating a Windows Service a blast. It has a PySide2 that is compatible with Nuitka (I did make PySide6 compatible myself, and backported it to PySide2), so if you need to stay on old software. And for IP protection, it is just incredibly important to not ship bytecode at all, and with Nuitka commercial, it protects your data and files at runtime too.
I am bad at marketing, but good at software, which is one more reason to purchase it. You know you love these kinds of people. Was that good marketing? Also, there are share buttons on this page. Please try them out and let people know about this.
In future postings, I will make it a regular thing to ask for help with some of the technical tasks. Stay tuned, there might be something that you can help with.
Becoming more active
I am the kind of person that would much rather do good stuff than to talk about it, like when it finally supports Python 3.11, normal old me would just mention it maybe on Twitter once, and have it in the changelog only.
I need to get away from that. I need to resume TWN (This week in Nuitka) and have all plans to do it. Obviously I can get caught up in things, and may just always do it later when there is more or better news.