[PyKDE] PyQT module size

[Giovanni Bajo]

Brian Thomason <brian.thomason at linspireinc.com> wrote:

> We've been using PyQT/PyKDE here at Linspire for some time now to
> develop a handful of applications.  One of these is Lsongs, and it has
> grown quite large and has a very large memory footprint.  We're trying
> to reduce this a bit in various ways (switching to gstreamer from
> libxine for instance) and I was curious if there was a way to reduce the
> footprint size of pyqt/pykde.  The shared object files themselves are
> quite large - Larger than their C++ counterparts.
>
> I'm totally ignorant on python bindings so this may just be "the way it
> is" and that's fine.  Just curious if there's a way to "shrink" these
> down a bit.

One low-hanging fruit could be recompiling them through the upcoming GCC 4
using the new -fvisibility=hidden -fvisibility-inline-hidden options. By
making only the needed symbols visibile (which AFAIK it is just one symbol
for a Python extension module), the shared object size will reduce somehow,
will be much much faster to load and will also be optimized better. See
http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.0/changes.html and
http://www.nedprod.com/programs/gccvisibility.html for further reference.
I'm sure there is already some infrastructure for this, as the windows
version of qt.pyd exports just one visible symbol.
-- 
Giovanni Bajo