“the data shows that a focused change to address file system inefficiencies has 
the potential to broadly and transparently deliver benefit to users without 
affecting existing code or workflows.”

This is consistent with a Node.js experiment I heard about where they compiled 
an entire application in a single (HUGE!) .js file. Reading a single large file 
from disk is quicker than many small files on every significant file system I’m 
aware of. Is there benefit to supporting import of .tar files as we currently 
do .zip? Or perhaps having a special fast-path for uncompressed .zip files?

Top-posted from my Windows phone

From: Carl Shapiro
Sent: Monday, May 7, 2018 14:36
To: Nathaniel Smith
Cc: Nick Coghlan; Python Dev
Subject: Re: [Python-Dev] A fast startup patch (was: Python startup time)

On Fri, May 4, 2018 at 6:58 PM, Nathaniel Smith <n...@pobox.com> wrote:
What are the obstacles to including "preloaded" objects in regular .pyc files, 
so that everyone can take advantage of this without rebuilding the interpreter?

The system we have developed can create a shared object file for each compiled 
Python file.  However, such a representation is not directly usable.  First, 
certain shared constants, such as interned strings, must be kept globally 
unique across object code files.  Second, some marshaled objects, such as the 
hashed collections, must be initialized with randomization state that is not 
available until after the hosting runtime has been initialized.

We are able to work around the first issue by generating a heap image with the 
transitive closure of all modules that will be loaded which allows us to easily 
maintain uniqueness guarantees.  We are able to work around the second issue 
with some unobservable changes to the affected data structures.
 
Based on our numbers, it appears there should be some hesitancy--at this 
time--to changing the format of compiled Python file for the sake of load-time 
performance.  In contrast, the data shows that a focused change to address file 
system inefficiencies has the potential to broadly and transparently deliver 
benefit to users without affecting existing code or workflows. 

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