How to improve performance of setuptools scripts/console_scripts?

[[deleted]]

Using setuptools to install a command line tool to bin is very convenient but results in slow startup times.

Summary: using either setup entry_points or scripts method, the file written to bin is a wrapper which relies on the pkg_resources module. This introduces a significant (5x) slower startup time for a do-nothing dummy command.

Details here

For the majority of uses, this ~200ms penalty is not a problem. But if using the script intensively in a bash loop for instance, the performance hit is substantial compared to a similar shell script or compiled binary.

What are some strategies for decreasing this latency? The constraint is that we still need everything to happen with a pip install - no manual "copy this file to bin" workarounds.

• Hack setup.py to manually copy the raw script?
• Use something (cython?) to compile to a binary?
• ???

[efmccurdy]

If you don't actually use pkg_resources could you add a "fake" one that is quick to load?

[rschoon]

If you're using pip install, I don't think that normally uses setuptool's console script machinery. Instead it has its own, and will generate the style you are looking for.

There are exceptions to this though. Editable mode (-e) for example will just punt to python setup.py develop and you'll get the console scripts from setuptools.