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[Python-Dev] buildin vs. shared modules

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Fri Oct 17 14:08:09 EDT 2003 
> "David LeBlanc" <whisper at oz.net> writes:
> 
> > A few things come to mind:
> >
> > What's the cost of mapping the world (all those entry points) at startup?
> >
> > You have to rebuild all of the main dll just to do something to one
> > component. To me, that's maybe the biggest single issue.

[Thomas Heller]
> Hm. How often do you hack the C code of the extension modules included
> with Python?

There's a small but important group of people who rebuild Python from
source with different compiler options (perhaps to enable debugging
their own extensions).  They often don't want to have to bother with
downloading external software that they don't use (like bz2 or bsddb).

> > Are app users/programmers going to have a bloat perception? How
> > many of them really understand that a dll is mapped and not loaded
> > at startup?
> >
> > IMO, it contradicts the unix way of smaller, compartmentalized is better.
> > It's not unix we're talking about, but it still makes sense to me, whatever
> > the OS.
> 
> Maybe unix solves all this, but on Windows it's called DLL Hell.

It's not DLL hell unless there are version issues.  I don't think
multiple extension modules contribute to that (they aern't in the
general Windows DLL search path anyway, only pythonXY.dll is, for the
benefit of Mark Hammond's COM support in win32all).

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
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