Currently, Apache Beam distributes Python packages through pip and PyPI. On PyPI, developers can release either source tarballs, and / or precompiled "wheel" distributions for each platform, which would be used if available for a particular platform. Currently, we only distribute the source tarballs, so any user who installs Beam using "pip install apache_beam" has to have a compiler and toolchain installed to take advantage of Cython optimizations in Beam (which require compiled C code). If such a compiler is not available, Beam is currently configured to install anyway, but will use slower Python codepaths instead of the more optimized ones (for example, for Coder encoding / decoding).
I would like to propose that we start distributing binary wheel distributions for our releases, for common platforms like Windows / Mac / Linux. We could potentially use a method similar to this one ( https://github.com/MacPython/cython-wheels) for building these wheel distributions. Thoughts? Best, Charles
