Speed of Python vs. Perl

[Robert Amesz]

Tim Peters wrote:

>The reasons for Python's relative startup sloth have been discussed
>here often; a big one is that Python runs around looking for Python
>files (like site.py and sitecustomize.py) at startup, and typically
>does a big pile of failing fstats while failing to find those files
>along the PYTHONPATH. 

If that's the case, couldn't at least some of that information be 
cached somewhere? (Somewhat like how *.py files are bytecompiled to 
*.pyc files, and rebuilt as needed).

Admittedly, it might not be trivial to determine when that cache file 
needs to be re-built. When installing something with distutils, that 
file could simply be deleted, of course, but there may be other issues.


Robert Amesz