17 December 2023

Kay Hayen
Python compiler Nuitka

Nuitka Release 1.9

This is to inform you about the new stable release of Nuitka. It is the extremely compatible Python compiler, “download now”.

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

Bug Fixes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Standalone: Added support for datasets module.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• MSYS2: For standalone add more GI dlls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Standalone: Added support for gradio package.

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

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

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

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

• Standalone: Added missing DLLs for PyAutoIt package.

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

• Standalone: Added more metadata requirements for transformers package.

• Standalone: Added support for newer transformers package.

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

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

New Features

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Optimization

• Optimization: Enhanced handling of aliased variables.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Anti-Bloat: Avoid URLs in numpy messages.

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

• Standalone: Avoid including libz on Linux.

• Quality: Use latest isort and rstchk versions.

Organizational

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cleanups

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

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

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

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

Tests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summary

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

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

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

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

Nuitka Release 1.8   Nuitka this week #14