There are use cases where you need to reduce the total size of your python deployed code including library code.
E.g:
I have to deploy a layer with pandas and numpy etc. Total size cannot be over 260mb.
One way is to compile python with python3 -m compileall -b. and then remove all the
*.py source files.
Don't do this on your source directory, but copy it to a different location e.g dist/
What I do is, copy the python pip packages into the dist folder, and then I run compileall.
After this find dist -iname "*.py" -exec rm {} \; to delete all source files.
The result is:
- smaller distribution size
- faster startup
Python loads *.py files, if a *.pyc file exists, it will load the *.pyc file,
there's a bit more to it, but I won't go into the details.
If only a *.pyc file exists, and no source file, python will still load the file.
This means you can run completely of precompiled python files.