Nuitka Release 0.3.21

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

This releases contains some really major enhancements, all heading towards enabling value propagation inside Nuitka. Assignments of all forms are now all simple and explicit, and as a result, now it will be easy to start tracking them.

Contractions have become functions internally, with statements use temporary variables, complex unpacking statement were reduced to more simple ones, etc.

Also there are the usual few small bug fixes, and a bunch of organisational improvements, that make the release complete.

Bug fixes

  • The built-in next could causes a program crash when iterating past the end of an iterator. Fixed in 0.3.20.1 already.

  • The set constants could cause a compiler error, as that type was not considered in the “mutable” check yet. Fixed in 0.3.20.2 already.

  • Performance regression. Optimize expression for exception types caught as well again, this was lost in last release.

  • Functions that contain exec, are supposed to have a writable locals. But when removing that exec statement as part of optimization, this property of the function could get lost.

  • The so called “overflow functions” are once again correctly handled. These once were left behind in some refactoring and had not been repaired until now. An overflow function is a nested function with an exec or a star import.

  • The syntax error for return outside of a function, was not given, instead the code returned at run time. Fixed to raise a SyntaxError at compile time.

Optimization

  • Avoid tuple objects to be created when catching multiple exception types, instead call exception match check function multiple times.

  • Removal of dead code following break, continue, return, and raise. Code that follows these statements, or conditional statements, where all branches end with it.

    Note

    These may not actually occur often in actual code, but future optimization may produce them more frequently, and their removal may in turn make other possible optimization.

  • Detect module variables as “read only” after all writes have been detected to not be executed as removed. Previously the “read only indicator” was determined only once and then stayed the same.

  • Expanded conditional statement optimization to detect cases, where condition is a compile time constant, not just a constant value.

  • Optimize away assignments from a variable to the same variable, they have no effect. The potential side effect of accessing the variable is left intact though, so exceptions will be raised still.

    Note

    An exception is where len = len actually does have an impact, because that variable becomes assignable. The “compile itself” test of Nuitka found that to happen with long from the nuitka.__past__ module.

  • Created Python3 variant of quick unicode string access, there was no such thing in the CPython C/API, but we make the distinction in the source code, so it makes sense to have it.

  • Created an optimized implementation for the built-in iter with 2 parameters as well. This allows for slightly more efficient code to be created with regards to reference handling, rather than using the CPython C/API.

  • For all types of variable assigned in the generated code, there are now methods that accept already taken references or not, and the code generator picks the optimal variant. This avoids the drop of references, that e.g. the local variable will insist to take.

  • Don’t use a “context” object for generator functions (and generator expressions) that don’t need one. And even if it does to store e.g. the given parameter values, avoid to have a “common context” if there is no closure taken. This avoids useless malloc calls and speeds up repeated generator object creation.

Organisational

  • Changed the Scons build file database to reside in the build directory as opposed to the current directory, not polluting it anymore. Thanks for the patch go to Michael H Kent, very much appreciated.

  • The --experimental option is no longer available outside of checkouts of git, and even there not on stable branches (master, hotfix/...). It only pollutes --help output as stable releases have no experimental code options, not even development version will make a difference.

  • The binary “bin/Nuitka.py” has been removed from the git repository. It was deprecated a while ago, not part of the distribution and served no good use, as it was a symbolic link only anyway.

  • The --python-version option is applied at Nuitka start time to re-launch Nuitka with the given Python version, to make sure that the Python run time used for computations and link time Python versions are the same. The allowed values are now checked (2.6, 2.7 and 3.2) and the user gets a nice error with wrong values.

  • Added --keep-pythonpath alias for --execute-with-pythonpath option, probably easier to remember.

  • Support --debug with clang, so it can also be used to check the generated code for all warnings, and perform assertions. Didn’t report anything new.

  • The contents environment variable CXX determines the default C++ compiler when set, so that checking with CXX=g++-4.7 nuitka-python ... has become supported.

  • The check-with-pylint script now has a real command line option to control the display of TODO items.

Cleanups

  • Changed complex assignments, i.e. assignments with multiple targets to such using a temporary variable and multiple simple assignments instead.

    a = b = c

    _tmp = c
b = _tmp
a = _tmp

    In CPython, when one assignment raises an exception, the whole thing is aborted, so the complexity of having multiple targets is no more needed, now that we have temporary variables in a block.

    All that was really needed, was to evaluate the complete source expression only once, but that made code generation contain ugly loops that are no more needed.

  • Changed unpacking assignments to use temporary variables. Code like this:

    a, b = c

    Is handled more like this:

    _tmp_iter = iter(c)
_tmp1 = next(_tmp_iter)
_tmp2 = next(_tmp_iter)
if not finished(_tmp_iter):
    raise ValueError("too many values to unpack")
a = _tmp1
b = _tmp2

    In reality, not really next is used, as it wouldn’t raise the correct exception for unpacking, and the finished check is more condensed into it.

    Generally this cleanup allowed that the AssignTargetTuple and associated code generation was removed, and in the future value propagation may optimize these next and iter calls away where possible. At this time, this is not done yet.

  • Exception handlers assign caught exception value through assignment statement.

    Previously the code generated for assigning from the caught exception was not considered part of the handler. It now is the first statement of an exception handler or not present, this way it may be optimized as well.

  • Exception handlers now explicitly catch more than one type.

    Catching multiple types worked by merits of the created tuple object working with the Python C/API function called, but that was not explicit at all. Now every handler has a tuple of exceptions it catches, which may only be one, or if None, it’s all.

  • Contractions are now functions as well.

    Contractions (list, dict, and set) are now re-formulated as function bodies that contain for loops and conditional statements. This allowed to remove a lot of special code that dealt with them and will make these easier to understand for optimization and value propagation.

  • Global is handled during tree building.

    Previously the global statement was its own node, which got removed during the optimization phase in a dedicated early optimization that applied its effect, and then removed the node.

    It was determined, that there is no reason to not immediately apply the effect of the global variable and take closure variables and add them to the provider of that global statement, allowing to remove the node class.

  • Read only module variable detection integrated to constraint collection.

    The detection of read only module variables was so far done as a separate step, which is no more necessary as the constraint collection tracks the usages of module variables anyway, so this separate and slow step could be removed.

New Tests

  • Added test to cover order of calls for complex assignments that unpack, to see that they make a fresh iterator for each part of a complex assignment.

  • Added test that unpacks in an exception catch. It worked, due to the generic handling of assignment targets by Nuitka, and I didn’t even know it can be done, example:

    try:
    raise ValueError(1, 2)
except ValueError as (a, b):
    print "Unpacking caught exception and unpacked", a, b

    Will assign a=1 and b=2.

  • Added test to cover return statements on module level and class level, they both must give syntax errors.

  • Cover exceptions from accessing unassigned global names.

  • Added syntax test to show that star imports do not allow other names to be imported at the same time as well.

  • Python3 is now also running the compile itself test successfully.

Summary

The progress made towards value propagation and type inference is very significant, and makes those appears as if they are achievable.

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