Simon Willison’s Weblog

djngo.com: Portable Django (via) “A 20mb executable zip file with Python 3.6 and Django 2.2. Works on Windows, Linux, MacOSX with x86_64 and aarch64 (yes, Apple M1 and Raspberry Pi).” The latest wizardry from the ecosystem surrounding the Cosmopolitan project, which provides a should-be-impossible mechanism for running the same executable on a bunch of different platforms. This utility by Ariel Núñez bundles Python and Django and SQLite, such that a Django application can become a portable executable ready to run on multiple platforms. It’s currently limited to Python 3.6 and Django 2.2 since those are the versions that run under Cosmopolitan, but I expect we’ll see more recent versions of those dependencies in the future. # 24th February 2023, 12:52 am

PocketPy. PocketPy is “a lightweight(~5000 LOC) Python interpreter for game engines”. It’s implemented as a single C++ header which provides an impressive subset of the Python language: functions, dictionaries, lists, strings and basic classes too. There’s also a browser demo that loads a 766.66 KB pypocket.wasm file (240.72 KB compressed) and uses it to power a basic terminal interface. I tried and failed to get that pypocket.wasm file working from wasmer/wasmtime/wasm3—it should make a really neat lightweight language to run in a WebAssembly sandbox. # 8th February 2023, 5:13 am

Making SQLite extensions pip install-able (via) Alex Garcia figured out how to bundle a compiled SQLite extension in a Python wheel (building different wheels for different platforms) and publish them to PyPI. This is a huge leap forward in terms of the usability of SQLite extensions, which have previously been pretty difficult to actually install and run. Alex also created Datasette plugins that depend on his packages, so you can now “datasette install datasette-sqlite-regex” (or datasette-sqlite-ulid, datasette-sqlite-fastrand, datasette-sqlite-jsonschema) to gain access to his custom SQLite extensions in your Datasette instance. It even works with “datasette publish --install” to deploy to Vercel, Fly.io and Cloud Run. # 6th February 2023, 7:44 pm

Python’s “Disappointing” Superpowers. Luke Plant provides a fascinating detailed list of Python libraries that use dynamic meta-programming tricks in interesting ways—including SQLAlchemy, Django, Werkzeug, pytest and more. # 1st February 2023, 10:41 pm

pyfakefs usage (via) New to me pytest fixture library that provides a really easy way to mock Python’s filesystem functions—open(), os.path.listdir() and so on—so a test can run against a fake set of files. This looks incredibly useful. # 1st February 2023, 10:37 pm

Python Sandbox in Web Assembly (via) Jim Kring responded to my questions on Mastodon about running Python in a WASM sandbox by building this repo, which demonstrates using wasmer-python to run a build of Python 3.6 compiled to WebAssembly, complete with protected access to a sandbox directory. # 25th January 2023, 9:10 pm

Mapping Python to LLVM (via) Codon is a fascinating new entry in the “compile Python code to something else” world—this time targeting LLVM. Ariya Shajii describes in great detail how it pulls this off, including tricks such as transforming Python generators to LLVM coroutines. Codon doesn’t promise that all Python code will work—it’s best thought of as a Python-like language which can be used to create compiled modules which can then be imported back into regular Python projects. # 10th January 2023, 2:08 am

nanoGPT. “The simplest, fastest repository for training/finetuning medium-sized GPTs”—by Andrej Karpathy, in about 600 lines of Python. # 2nd January 2023, 11:27 pm

Boring Python: code quality. James Bennett provides an opinionated guide to setting up Python tools for linting, code formatting and and other code quality concerns. Of particular interest to me is his section on packaging checks, which introduces a whole bunch of new-to-me tools that can help avoid accidentally shipping broken packages to PyPI. # 20th December 2022, 7:55 pm

PyScript Updates: Bytecode Alliance, Pyodide, and MicroPython. Absolutely huge news about Python on the Web tucked into this announcement: Anaconda have managed to get a version of MicroPython compiled to WebAssembly running in the browser. Pyodide weighs in at around 6.5MB compressed, but the MicroPython build is just 303KB—the size of a large image. This makes Python in the web browser applicable to so many more potential areas. # 9th November 2022, 10:26 pm

Chris Amico’s Python setup for 2022 (via) Homebrew to install pyenv, then pyenv to install specific Python versions. pipx and pipenv for package management. I need to habitually start using pyenv for everything. # 18th October 2022, 2:04 pm

How to create a Python package in 2022 (via) Fantastic tutorial on modern Python packaging by Rodrigo Girão Serrão. I’ve been meaning to figure out Poetry for a while now and this gave me exactly the information I needed to start figuring it out. Great coverage of GitHub Actions, Tox and pre-commit as well. # 15th October 2022, 10:10 pm

py2rs. Extremely useful document providing resources for learning Rust followed by an extensive collection of common Python tasks (building a list, opening a file, spawning a thread, running a simple web server) and their Rust equivalents. # 7th October 2022, 5:44 pm

PEP 554 – Multiple Interpreters in the Stdlib: Shared data (via) Python 3.12 hopes to introduce multiple interpreters as part of the Python standard library, so Python code will be able to launch subinterpreters, each with their own independent GIL. This will allow Python code to execute on multiple CPU cores at the same time while ensuring existing code (and C modules) that rely on the GIL continue to work.

The obvious question here is how data will be shared between those interpreters. This PEP proposes a channels mechanism, where channels can be used to send just basic Python types between interpreters: None, bytes, str, int and channels themselves (I wonder why not floats?) # 20th September 2022, 1:25 am

Deploying Python web apps as AWS Lambda functions. After literally years of failed half-hearted attempts, I finally managed to deploy an ASGI Python web application (Datasette) to an AWS Lambda function! Here are my extensive notes. # 19th September 2022, 4:05 am

APSW is now available on PyPI. News I missed from June: the venerable (17+ years old) APSW SQLite library for Python is now officially available on PyPI as a set of wheels, built using cibuildwheel. This is a really big deal: APSW is an extremely well maintained library which exposes way more low-level SQLite functionality than the standard library’s sqlite3 module, and to-date one of the only disadvantages of using it was the need to install it independently of PyPI. Now you can just run “pip install apsw”. # 15th September 2022, 10:18 pm

TIL: You Can Build Portable Binaries of Python Applications (via) Hynek Schlawack on the brilliant PyOxidizer by Gregory Szorc. # 7th September 2022, 9:41 pm

Should You Use Upper Bound Version Constraints? (via) Should you pin your library’s dependencies using “click>=7,<8” or “click~=7.0”? Henry Schreiner’s short answer is no, and his long answer is an exhaustive essay covering every conceivable aspect of this thorny Python packaging problem. # 5th September 2022, 5:42 pm

storysniffer (via) Ben Welsh built a small Python library that guesses if a URL points to an article on a news website, or if it’s more likely to be a category page or /about page or similar. I really like this as an example of what you can do with a tiny machine learning model: the model is bundled as a ~3MB pickle file as part of the package, and the repository includes the Jupyter notebook that was used to train it. # 1st August 2022, 11:40 pm

Packaging Python Projects with pyproject.toml. I decided to finally figure out how packaging with pyproject.toml works—all of my existing projects use setup.py. The official tutorial from the Python Packaging Authority (PyPA) had everything I needed. # 29th July 2022, 11:18 pm

Fastest way to turn HTML into text in Python (via) A light benchmark of the new-to-me selectolax Python library shows it performing extremely well for tasks such as extracting just the text from an HTML string, after first manipulating the DOM. selectolax is a Python binding over the Modest and Lexbor HTML parsing engines, which are written in no-outside-dependency C. # 27th July 2022, 5:55 pm

Cosmopolitan: Compiling Python. Cosmopolitan is Justine Tunney’s “build-once run-anywhere C library”—part of the αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε effort, which produces wildly clever binary executable files that work on multiple different platforms, and is the secret sauce behind redbean. I hadn’t realized this was happening but there’s an active project to get Python to work as this format, producing a new way of running Python applications as standalone executables, only these ones have the potential to run unmodified on Windows, Linux and macOS. # 26th July 2022, 8:43 pm

Announcing Pyston-lite: our Python JIT as an extension module (via) The Pyston JIT can now be installed in any Python 3.8 virtual environment by running “pip install pyston_lite_autoload”—which includes a hook to automatically inject the JIT. I just tried a very rough benchmark against Datasette (ab -n 1000 -c 10) and got 391.20 requests/second without the JIT compared to 404.10 request/second with it. # 8th June 2022, 5:58 pm

Compiling Black with mypyc (via) Richard Si is a Black contributor who recently obtained a 2x performance boost by compiling Black using the mypyc tool from the mypy project, which uses Python type annotations to generate a compiled C version of the Python logic. He wrote up this fantastic three-part series describing in detail how he achieved this, including plenty of tips on Python profiling and clever optimization tricks. # 31st May 2022, 11:24 pm

Benjamin “Zags” Zagorsky: Handling Timezones in Python. The talks from PyCon US have started appearing on YouTube. I found this one really useful for shoring up my Python timezone knowledge: It reminds that if your code calls datetime.now(), datetime.utcnow() or date.today(), you have timezone bugs—you’ve been working with ambiguous representations of instances in time that could span a 26 hour interval from UTC-12 to UTC+14. date.today() represents a 24 hour period and hence is prone to timezone surprises as well. My code has a lot of timezone bugs! # 26th May 2022, 3:40 am

sqlite-utils 3.26.1 (via) I released sqlite-utils 3.36.1 with one tiny but exciting feature: I fixed its one dependency that wasn’t published as a pure Python wheel, which means it can now be used with Pyodide—Python compiled to WebAssembly running in your browser! # 2nd May 2022, 6:43 pm

PyScript demos (via) PyScript was announced at PyCon this morning. It’s a new open source project that provides Web Components built on top of Pyodide, allowing you to use Python directly within your HTML pages in a way that is executed using a WebAssembly copy of Python running in your browser. These demos really help illustrate what it can do—it’s a fascinating new piece of the Python web ecosystem. # 30th April 2022, 9:50 pm