28 August 2010

Nuitka Release 0.2

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

Good day, this is a major step ahead, improvements everywhere.

Bug Fixes

  • Migrated the Python parser from the deprecated and problematic compiler module to the ast module which fixes the d[a,] = b parser problem. A pity it was not available at the time I started, but the migration was relatively painless now.

  • I found and fixed wrong encoding of binary data into C++ literals. Now Nuitka uses C++0x raw strings, and these problems are gone.

  • The decoding of constants was done with the marshal module, but that appears to not deeply care enough about unicode encoding it seems. Using cPickle now, which seems less efficient, but is more correct.

  • Another difference is gone: The continue and break inside loops do no longer prevent the execution of finally blocks inside the loop.

Organizational

  • I now maintain the “README.txt” in org-mode, and intend to use it as the issue tracker, but I am still a beginner at that.

    Update

    Turned out I never mastered it, and used ReStructured Text instead.

  • There is a public git repository for you to track Nuitka releases. Make your changes and then git pull --rebase. If you encounter conflicts in things you consider useful, please submit the patches and a pull request. When you make your clones of Nuitka public, use nuitka-unofficial or not the name Nuitka at all.

  • There is a now a mailing list (since closed).

Reduced Differences

  • Did you know you could write lambda : (yield something) and it gives you a lambda that creates a generator that produces that one value? Well, now Nuitka has support for lambda generator functions.

  • The from __future__ import division statement works as expected now, leading to some newly passing CPython tests.

  • Same for from __future__ import unicode_literals statement, these work as expected now, removing many differences in the CPython tests that use this already.

New Features

  • The Python binary provided and Nuitka.py are now capable of accepting parameters for the program executed, in order to make it even more of a drop-in replacement to python.

  • Inlining of exec statements with constant expressions. These are now compiled at compile time, not at run time anymore. I observed that an increasing number of CPython tests use exec to do things in isolation or to avoid warnings, and many more these tests will now be more effective. I intend to do the same with eval expressions too, probably in a minor release.

Summary

So give it a whirl. I consider it to be substantially better than before, and the list of differences to CPython is getting small enough, plus there is already a fair bit of polish to it. Just watch out that it needs gcc-4.5 or higher now.

New git repository to sync with Nuitka releases   Nuitka Release 0.2.1