Nuitka Release 0.6.7

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

This release contains bug fixes and improvements to the packaging, for the RPM side as well as for Debian, to cover Python3 only systems as they are now becoming more common.

Bug Fixes

  • Compatibility: The value of __module__ for extension modules was not dependent into which package the module was loaded, it now is.

  • Anaconda: Enhanced detection of Anaconda for Python 3.6 and higher.

  • CentOS6: Detect gcc version to allow saving on macro memory usage, very old gcc didn’t have that.

  • Include Python3 for all Fedora versions where it works as well as for openSUSE versions 15 and higher.

  • Windows: Using short path names to interact with Scons avoids problems with unicode paths in all cases.

  • macOS: The usage of install_name_tool could sometimes fail due to length limits, we now increase it at link time.

  • macOS: Do not link against libpython for module mode. This prevented extension modules from actually being usable.

  • Python3.6: Follow coroutine fixes in our asyncgen implementation as well.

  • Fix, our version number handling could overflow with minor versions past 10, so we limited it for now.

New Features

  • Added support for Python 3.8, the experimental was already there and pretty good, but now added the last obscure features too.

  • Plugins can now provide C code to be included in the compilation.

  • Distutils: Added targets build_nuitka and install_nuitka to complement bdist_nuitka, so we support software other than wheels, e.g. RPM packaging that compiles with Nuitka.

  • Added support for lldb the Clang debugger with the --debugger mode.

Optimization

  • Make the file prefix map actually work for gcc and clang, and compile files inside the build folder, unless we are running in debugger mode, so we use ccache caching across different compilations for at least the static parts.

  • Avoid compilation of __frozen.c in accelerated mode, it’s not used.

  • Prefer using the inline copy of scons over systems scons. The later will only be slower. Use the fallback to external scons only from the Debian packages, since there we consider it forbidden to include software as a duplicate.

Organisational

  • Added recommended plugins for Visual Code, replacing the list in the Developer Manual.

  • Added repository for Fedora 30 for download.

  • Added repository for CentOS 8 for download.

  • Updated inline copy of Scons used for Python3 to 3.1.2, which is said to be faster for large compilations.

  • Removed Eclipse setup from the manual, it’s only infererior at this point and we do not use it ourselves.

  • Debian: Stop recommending PyQt5 in the package, we no longer use it for built-in GUI that was removed.

  • Debian: Bumped the standards version and modernized the packaging, solving a few warnings during the build.

Cleanups

  • Scons: Avoid to add Unix only include paths on Windows.

  • Scons: Have the static source code in a dedicated folder for clarity.

Tests

  • Added tests to Github Actions, for the supported Python versions for all of Linux, macOS and Windows, covering the later publicly for the first time. We use Anaconda on macOS for the tests now, rather than Homebrew.

  • Enable IO encoding to make sure we use UTF8 for more test suites that actually need it in case of problems.

  • Comparing module outputs now handles segfaults by running in the debugger too.

Summary

This release adds full support for Python 3.8 finally, which took us a while, and it cleans up a lot on the packaging side. There aren’t that many important bug fixes, but it’s still nice to this cleaned up.

We have important actual optimization in the pipeline that will apply specialization to target types and for comparison operations. We expect to see actual performance improvements in the next release again.

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