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libpython as a shared library?

Gregor Hoffleit gregor at hoffleit.de
Tue Jun 4 10:34:02 EDT 2002 
* Oleg Broytmann <phd at phd.pp.ru> [020604 10:51]:
> On Mon, Jun 03, 2002 at 08:24:28PM +0000, Gregory (Grisha) Trubetskoy wrote:
> > Has there been any progress in making an option of building libpython as a
> > shared lib (.so)? I saw some feature requests, but couldn't quite figure
> > out the ultimate status of this.
> 
>    Implemeneted in Python 2.3. Download CVS version or nightly tarball.

Debian has had libpython as a shared lib since a while. Recently, we got
a report that the performance of the shared version is dramatically
slower than the statically linked version (e.g. about 30%). I made some
pystone tests on different architectures of our GNU/Linux, and tried
different flags for building and linking the library (and different
Python versions), and in fact there seems a significant speed penalty
involved as soon as the interpreter is linked against the shared
library. The penalty has some correlation to the architecture, but it is
significant on all tested constellations.

I'll give a try at the 2.3 tree and see if the problem can be confirmed
there as well.

I would be interested if people could try to confirm this with other
operating systems and other variants of GNU/Linux as well.

    Gregor
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