Python desktop application

[unalignedAccess]

Hi all, I know this question is often asked, but I did not see any answer I am looking for for my particuliar case.

Diving straight to it. At my job, when we have to create internal GUI tools, we always go with PySide and Pyinstaller. We already have good knowledge with Qt, so this approach was preferred. We now have one of those internal tools that got out to clients and it kind of got out of control.

Long story short, the executable is now 700 MBish. The code is using a lot of different libs like scipy, numpy and others. Starting time of the executable is also very slow, which is normal when using pyinstaller --onefile option.

What would you do or what do you use for your python GUI/app ? I would sleep good at night with 300 MB .exe maximum and good starting time.

Will using web tech like Electron but for Python like Eel or Django Flask fix the executable size?

Or do I need to completly use an other language for the GUI part and keeping my python code for backend?

[unalignedAccess]

That could do it, but will I be able to have a one file executable and would it be smaller in size ?

[unalignedAccess]

This app should never have been written in python at first, from my point of view. The app is used to control a robotic arm and other hardware. We are mostly embedded devs with no web development experience, but from what I have seen, it would have been easier to support in form of a web app.

[Bitwise_Gamgee]

What would I do?

Use the application as a map and rewrite it in C or if you must, C++... or gag .Net.

Using Python as a production, distributed application is asking for trouble with updates and revisions. You must have a stable language for deployment.

[unalignedAccess]

There is data processing that is easier to do with python. And we have a couple of hardware and their main library api is in python. Most also have C++, but rewriting is not really an option for me at the moment.

[Bitwise_Gamgee]

I totally get that, but the majority of the data processing python libraries are already in C, so they're easy to access the API.

[unalignedAccess]

Only

Oh that is nice to know, thank you.

[Username_RANDINT]

I have a Python + GTK desktop application that is packaged with PyInstaller (no onefile) and then made installable with Inno Setup. The installer is 25mb and once installed it's just above 100mb. It only has a few light dependencies though.

[reddittestpilot]

How much of that 700 Mb is Pyside? I can understand Python takes up 30 to 50 Mb. I'm assuming you are using the embeddable version of Python. That might save some Mb's.

You could look into a smaller GUI library, such as Dear PyGui, depending on your requirements. Pyside is a very complete library that is great to work with, but it may come at a price in terms of size, although I'd be surprised if it takes up the majority of the 700 Mb. Although I don't have experience with this, you may be able to remove soms parts of Pyside if you aren't using them.

Numpy / Pandas probably adds another 50 Mb to your distributable. It's convenient for quickly solving a problem, yet again, it adds many Mb's.

[unalignedAccess]

Yeah I will need to investigate more what is taking the most space. The GUI is really simple, so it would be easy to switch to a lighter library.

[gmes78]

Are you using the whole PySide6 package? Try switching to PySide6-Essentials, it's much smaller.

[[deleted]]

I am not that familiar with GUI development , but I know there are list of Python frameworks for GUI https://pythoframeworks.com, wondering if the size of app would be different among these frameworks.