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Comment by v3ss0n | Hacker News Reader

Tried nutika it compile but ends up in several hundred mb binary for non data science app.it bring no performance benefits either.

What's the benefits over shipping as docker?

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* Just a normal executable rather than something that needs a separate runtime - yes I know Docker is near universal on Linux for developers but less so for users and it doesn't integrate well with user permissions.

* Works fine for graphical applications (again this is possible with Docker but not zero configuration).

* Despite your complaint about size I still suspect it's a lot small than a complete Docker image.

* Works natively on Windows, unlike Docker

BTW the ideal mode is standalone rather than onefile - this outputs a directory including your program and separate files for any C extensions modules. That will let you chase down the offending module(s) that are hundreds of MB. Which in your case there must be - I distribute a small Qt program and even that is only 10s of MB.

Also, you don't need to install Docker ;)

Nuitka's primary aim is performance, more so than self-contained deployment. It's a bit strange to pit Nuitka against "shipping with Docker". It's also surprising to hear that you saw no performance benefits at all - but then again, perhaps your application isn't that much Python but just a small bit of Python wrapped around fast libraries written in e.g. C?

I was under the impression that speedup with Nuitka was fairly modest and you probably get faster with pypy

e.g. there's some benchmarks here https://pybenchmarks.org/ and they mostly seem to go: Python 3 -> Nuitka (slightly faster) -> Cython (much faster) -> PyPy (faster again)

So I always assumed the main advantage was more in producing a single binary

And I'd consider that a big advantage over "shipping with Docker" for many use cases, e.g. building cli tools

I wonder why Mypyc isn't in that benchmark.

Python 3 really changed a lot, more than I realized. My experiences with Nuitka are against Python 2 from a couple of years back, at a point where Nuitka marketed itself using its performance increases and brought (at least) a 3-5x speedup on almost everything you threw at it.

i've not seen any performance boost for my code either via nuitka, using mostly pure python and a little numpy

not that i mean to complain about having a working python compiler, i think its neat

Not everyone is a computer expert. My Mum could download and run an executable; I doubt she'd have much luck via Docker :)

Good point

Code obfuscation is sometime important.

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