Our Luxurious, Rubinesque, Python 2.4

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Larry Hastings wrote:
> Can someone tell me what made it 80% larger?  

python24.dll includes many of the extension modules that were separate
.pyd files in 2.3, namely _csv, _sre, _symtable, _winreg, datetime,
mmap, and parser, i.e. all extension modules that don't require specific
libraries. Furthermore, a few builtin modules where added to 2.4 that
were not present in 2.3 at all.

 > Also, how much would I be able to trim away if
 > I recompiled it myself?

Hard to tell. I think people have been able to get it down to 180k.

 > Is a lot of it native
> implementations of Python libraries that I might not care about
> including, or is it all fundamental VM stuff that couldn't possibly be
> removed?

No. Most of it is modules, followed by objects. Removing modules is
easy; removing objects is more difficult: while you could make a Python
interpreter easily that does not support complex numbers, it is much
harder to build a Python interpreter that does not support weak
references.

Regards,
Martin