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Comment by Cadwhisker | Hacker News Reader

I've not tried Nuitka yet, but I've done similar things with 2 other tools to package up a Qt-based GUI tool that has a Windows installer, Mac ".dmg" or a Linux package:

* FBS (FMan's Build System) - worked well for a while, but we couldn't upgrade Qt past a certain version and he version we used was only happy with Python 3.6.

* Beeware - our current solution. Very, very happy with this; works smoothly, lets us use the latest Python and Qt versions and lets us make professional-looking installers that we can distribute.

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fbs author here; The Pro version of fbs [1] now supports Python > 3.6 and recent Qt versions.

1: https://build-system.fman.io

What I love about HN. You can discuss almost anything and the project's creator pops up in the thread.

Ah, great news. Thanks for making FBS; it is incredibly liberating to find a tool that lets us write Python GUI apps and have them appear as if they were made by XCode or Visual Studio.

Happy if you find it useful!

Nice option for building Python+Qt applications!

Buying the Pro version still leaves one to deal with Qt licensing does it not?

Yes. But usually you can use it under the LGPL and thus for free.

Tried to use this recently. I don’t understand the decision to limit the free version to versions < 3.6. It would be beneficial for you and your users if you at least have a free trial for versions above 3.6.

I track my time and have spent 570 hours since 2018 working on fbs. The vast majority of this (526h) was for the free version you are complaining about, the nice documentation etc. You are criticizing me for not giving you everything I do for free?

sorry, i don't mean it as criticism and I am not asking you to give it away for free.

I was suggesting that, for you to make more $$$ from it, its better to provide a free trial period for the said version.

Just wanted to drop in and appreciate your work.

It's documented very well, extremely easy to use and the pro version is priced very well.

Hey - first of all, looks great and I'll definitely look into it. Good job!

Question - do you have any comparisons on the size of the resulting distributed executable compared to Nuitka, pyinstaller?

This is the issue I've faced. Nontrivial programs (that, say, import pandas, numpy, selenium) are huge, implying a ~250MB+ download for the user - and then maybe up to 1GB in disk when its all unpacked.

BTW the error tracking described in the Manual sounds great. Are you affiliated to Sentry in any way?

No affiliation whatsoever. If you want to use Sentry for almost free, you can use my (old) scripts for deploying it to a $5 / month VPS: https://github.com/mherrmann/sentry-self-hosted

Thanks! Regarding your question: fbs uses PyInstaller under the hood, so the binaries should be pretty similar in size.

The OpenBLAS version of NumPy (from pip rather than conda), plus PyQt5, can fit in around 100 megabytes uncompressed on disk for a Win64 binary. However I no longer recommend writing number crunching apps in Python, since you don't have thread-based parallelism due to the GIL, and have to awkwardly shuffle data across processes. (Last time I tried multiprocessing, some data can only be sent to workers on Linux using fork-based worker spawning, and not on Windows which lacks fork and requires pickling.)

If the number crunching is numpy-heavy, multiple threads absolutely can use real thread-based parallelism. C extensions like numpy release the GIL and so can run in parallel.

I'm using fbs in an open source (GPLv2+) project, is there a way to upgrade or am I stuck with old python?

Beeware sounds really interesting. I've often wondered if there are any things like it out there that can help me build complex GUIs (e.g. user interfaces with interactive 3D stuff), and an interface that doesn't look like its from the 90s. I'll look into Beeware more in depth, hopefully it can handle stuff like that.

Thanks, I'm going to look at Beeware. Struggled a while back trying to package a Qt app with Nuitka.

Did you also evaluate Kivvy?

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