Is 3.8 supported?

[Gertjan Klein]

Hi,

The GitHub repository reports PyInstaller supports Python 3.5 - 3.8, but
PyPI still claims 3.5 - 3.7. Which is right? I attempted to find out, by
installing PyInstaller on 3.8 (on Windows). This succeeded, and I can
create an executable with it (using a simple hello, world script).
However, the resulting executable is almost twice the size of the one
generated on Python 3.7 (10.4M vs. 5.8M), and additionally takes quite a
few seconds extra to start. (About four, every run, the 3.7 version
takes less than half a second.)

Is the above expected? Does 4.0 simply not (yet) support Python 3.8?
Should I file a bug report? (I have a transcript of the install/run
sessions of both 3.7 and 3.8, if needed.)

Regards,
Gertjan.

[bwoodsend]

PyInstaller 4.0 (the one on PyPI) doesn’t fully support 3.8 but most of the 3.8 issues were fixed so you usually can get away with it. PyInstaller 4.1 fully supports 3.8 but it isn’t out yet. You can use the development version on Github.

As for the increases in size and startup time - I’m not seeing this when I try freezing print("hello") with Python 3.7 and 3.8. I get 7.1MB both times. Try building in --onedir mode then compare what’s different or being added. Presumably 3.8 is including a package you don’t need which 3.7 doesn’t have installed. Startup time is mostly your antivirus giving everything a scan as a onefile app unpacks itself. The unzipping itself should be almost instant for such a small program. But that 4 seconds latency suggests something else is happening.

​

[Gertjan Klein]

bwoodsend wrote:
> PyInstaller 4.0 (the one on PyPI) doesn’t fully support 3.8 but most of
> the 3.8 issues were fixed so you usually can get away with it.
> PyInstaller 4.1 fully supports 3.8 but it isn’t out yet. You can use the
> development version on Github.

I am in no rush. I use PyInstaller to convert a few utilities I wrote
into a single file executable. I wrote these in Python 3.7; I'd like to
use 3.8 (mostly for assignment expressions), but there is no pressing need.

> As for the increases in size and startup time - I’m not seeing this when
> I try freezing |print("hello")| with Python 3.7 and 3.8. I get 7.1MB
> both times.

This is really weird. My test program is just this:

"""
def main():
print('Hello, world!')
if __name__ == '__main__':
main()
"""

That gets me (on Python 3.7.3) 5.856.459 bytes as single file
executable. I don't understand why that would be so different to your test.

> Try building in |--onedir| mode then compare what’s
> different or being added. Presumably 3.8 is including a package you
> don’t need which 3.7 doesn’t have installed.

I compared the imports as reported in the xref report; they were mostly
identical, but only Python 3.7 imported these:

encodings.cp65001
encodings.unicode_internal

These seem unimportant. Only Python 3.8 imported these:

pyi_rth__tkinter.py
pyi_rth_multiprocessing.py

This seems suspicious. EXE-00.toc of the 3.8 version confirms that
_tkinter.pyd is included, as (hence) are tk86t.dll and tcl86t.dll. This
explains part of the size difference.

Loaded hooks for 3.7:
3925 INFO: Loading module hook 'hook-encodings.py' from [...]
4009 INFO: Loading module hook 'hook-xml.py' from [...]

(no run-time hooks)

Loaded hooks for 3.8:
5994 INFO: Loading module hook 'hook-distutils.py' [...]
6009 INFO: Loading module hook 'hook-encodings.py' [...]
6079 INFO: Loading module hook 'hook-lib2to3.py' [...]
6141 INFO: Loading module hook 'hook-sysconfig.py' [...]
6141 INFO: Loading module hook 'hook-xml.etree.cElementTree.py' [...]
6141 INFO: Loading module hook 'hook-xml.py' [...]
6192 INFO: Loading module hook 'hook-_tkinter.py' [...]

6528 INFO: Including run-time hook [...]pyi_rth__tkinter.py
6528 INFO: Including run-time hook [...]pyi_rth_multiprocessing.py

(Python 3.8.6 is freshly downloaded and has nothing installed;
PyInstaller is installed in a venv, with nothing else installed.) The
hooks shows elementtree and multiprocessing are included as well.

Using --onedir, I noticed that quite a few things are bigger in 3.8.
Libcrypto-1_1: 2.4->3.3 MB; python3x.dll: 3.6->4.1 MB; the test program
itself: 1.4->2.1 MB. I *really* don't understand how 3.8 can yield the
same size executable for you.

Lastly, I noticed that --onedir on 3.8 results in quite a few
subdirectories (encoding, http1.0, messages, ...) which don't appear in
the 3.7 --onedir build.

> Startup time is mostly your
> antivirus giving everything a scan as a onefile app unpacks itself. The
> unzipping itself should be almost instant for such a small program. But
> that 4 seconds latency suggests something else is happening.

The --ondir version executable doesn't exhibit this behavior, so it is
related to the unpacking. I temporarily disabled Windows Defender, and
sure enough: the program now starts in about half a second, instead of
four. Turning Defender back on gets me over four seconds startup time again.

Regards,
Gertjan.