> People have requested this because they were shocked of the increase > in size of the Python interpreter, which primarily originates from the > Unicode character database. While I think people would get over their > shock as time passes, I think creating a "small" interpreter for > special-purpose applications is desirable, and just deleting Unicode > support in such a build was (and still is) a low-hanging fruit. I wanted to make a gesture towards the developers of the PalmOS port (Pippy), who have struggled mightily to keep memory usage small. But nothing is happening there (I've asked them to make it a SF project but apparently Endeavors Technology refuses). I think the iPAQ has enough memory to support Unicode, and that's the only small platform I'm aware of that uses Python. Of course, there are probably other embedded platforms -- but they have to speak up. BTW, the savings aren't that big. I built Python with all the configure options disabled that I could find (hm, there's no way to disable complex from the command line so that's still in) and here are the sizes: text data bss dec hex filename (file size) 531629 92336 9804 633769 9aba9 small_python (1904k) 613718 117588 11612 742918 b5606 python (2168k) > That said, I see no reason why the test suite should pass in such a > build. I would suggest to let this code rot (as long as you can still > build the interpreter without Unicode), and wait for users to complain > that features don't work in disable-unicode builds that they think > should work. I don't think the tests have to pass. But I do think that importing a module and using its basic functionality should work, unless perhaps it is designed to work only with Unicode (like the XML modules). The email package violates this: Charset.py starts with "from types import UnicodeType" and it is in turn imported by the basic Message module. > Maybe we can take this feature out in P3k when we find that nobody > uses it. Until then, I would propose to leave it roughly at the state > of WITHOUT_COMPLEX. Does anybody know whether the test suite passes if > you build WITHOUT_COMPLEX? Dunno, but there's much less code affected. (Although, like unicode, I know of some unittests that use complex as an example of a "weird" type.) --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.4