[quietbritishjim]

Also worth checking out: Nuitka [1]. It actually compiles your Python into machine code (albeit still making use of the CPython interpreter).

Despite the title, pyinstaller doesn't really compile anything, it just bundles your bytecode and the interpreter into a binary. That's often useful, but it's not the same thing. You can get similar-ish results to Nuitka by combining pyinstaller with Cython but it's quite a bit of work.

[1] https://nuitka.net/

[mid-kid]

> albeit still making use of the CPython interpreter

The CPython runtime. The point of Nuitka is to not use the interpreter :P

[dmingod666]

This sounds much better than pyinstaller. How was your experience with it? Is it straight forward or did you see issues or had to do tweaks to your code to make it work?

[quietbritishjim]

So far I haven't had to make any tweaks to my code, though I don't try to do anything fancy.

Getting it to work with dependencies can be a bit trickier, some of them need some Nuitka-specific hacks. The Nuitka creator/maintainer actually maintains a shocking number of these himself, in the form of Nuitka "plugins". It can be hard to figure out the right command line syntax to enable these, which is obviously a small inconvenience compared to creating them in the first place but can still be annoying. So far I've used Qt and numpy plugins and they work well. Trio doesn't work at the moment but support is likely to be coming soon. As one of the top comments for pyinstaller here says, you'll probably be better off if you're using Nuitka from day 1 rather than suddenly using it for a big exclusive project.

As with pyinstaller, it has the option to bundle everything into a single file. This is convenient but has the same disadvantage of being a bit wasteful, especially on Windows where it extracts files to the temp directory on every run (as another comment says about pyinstaller). On Linux I think it uses a ramdeive.

A very nice feature of Nuitka is a alternative mode where it doesn't put everything into one file. All the pure Python is compiled to a binary but it leaves all the binary dependencies and resources separate, which you can then deploy together in a directory. This is a bit less convenient for users but a bit more efficient and has the very nice property of being LGPL compliant if you're using PyQt/PySide. It's also useful for debugging the single-file mode, since that is really a wrapper around this mode.

[dmingod666]

Thanks for the detailed note! :)

[RMPR]

Not OP but my experience trying out nuitka vs PyInstaller on atbswp[0] is nuitka takes significantly longer (and CPU time) to run and in my case the resulting executable wasn't working, it was because I use wxPython or some hidden import in my dependencies, I don't remember exactly. Bottom-line I think nuitka is great if you (or your dependencies) does not do black magic in the imports, otherwise you're in for a lot of debugging.

0: https://github.com/rmpr/atbswp