Rocco Moretti wrote:
Peter Hansen wrote:
The main script is generally not compiled, but all imported
scripts are generally compiled automatically, the first time
they are imported, and never again unless the source changes.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression
that the main script *is* compiled, but the byte-code compiled file is
kept in memory, and not written to disk.
Rocco, you're quite correct and I misspoke. I did of course
mean "the main script's bytecode is not written to disk in
a .pyc file".
To the OP: one might interpret your question differently, now
that I look again at your usage of "compiled". If you
thought that code that didn't get into a .pyc file was somehow
not compiled, you were wrong. *All* Python code gets compiled,
whether it's in the main script, imported modules, or even
in an exec statement or a call to eval(). The only difference
is that imported modules have the output of the compilation
process (i.e. the bytecode) cached in a .pyc or .pyo file
to allow skipping a later redundant recompilation stage if
the .py source has not changed. Therefore one could say that
Python never executes .py files, so your observation about
performance is correct: there is no difference.
-Peter
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