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Comment by jwilk | Hacker News Reader

Entry points are excellent at making your scripts start slooooooooow.

Compare

  $ time python -m pyflakes /dev/null
  
  real	0m0.225s
  user	0m0.103s
  sys	0m0.008s

with

  $ time pyflakes /dev/null
  
  real	0m2.468s
  user	0m1.738s
  sys	0m0.055s

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I did not get as dramatic of results as you.

  # python3 -m venv example
  # source example/bin/activate
  (example) # pip install pyflakes
  Collecting pyflakes
    Downloading pyflakes-1.5.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl (225kB)
      100% || 225kB 892kB/s 
  Installing collected packages: pyflakes
  Successfully installed pyflakes-1.5.0
  (example) # time for i in {00..99}; do python -m pyflakes /dev/null; done
  real    0m7.167s
  user    0m6.407s
  sys 0m0.750s
  (example) # time for i in {00..99}; do pyflakes /dev/null; done
  
  real    0m7.661s
  user    0m6.894s
  sys 0m0.753s

I guess it gets worse when you have more stuff installed in the environment.

I've noticed that using argparse makes my scripts start very slow, especially if you expose a large number of option. I have a script that I wrote for work that has quite a variable number of available options and it can sometimes take several seconds for the script to startup and actually begin doing anything useful.

Argparse's source is possibly the most difficult lib to grow from the stdlib. https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Lib/argparse.p...

For me, it is not debugable. I wanted to propose and start a reference implementation for supporting --[no-]bool-opt, but I quickly gave up. There's some solutions on SO, but none of them are sufficient. The best solution makes --bool-opt mutually exclusive to --no-bool-opt which will cause a hard failure which is not okay for shell aliases.

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