#294: Specializing Adaptive Interpreters in Full Color

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Michael #1: Specialist: Python 3.11 perf highlighter

• via Alex Waygood
• Visualize CPython 3.11's specializing, adaptive interpreter. 🔥
• PEP 659 – Specializing Adaptive Interpreter
• Specialist uses fine-grained location information to create visual representations of exactly where and how CPython 3.11's new specializing, adaptive interpreter optimizes your code.
• Dark, rich colors indicate code with many quickened instructions (and, therefore, high specialization potential), while light, pale colors indicate code with relatively few specialization opportunities.

Brian #2: tomli “A lil’ TOML parser”

• Fully compatible with TOML spec 1.0.0
• This is the library that tomllib from Python 3.11 is based on, so great to use for Python 3.7-3.10 applications.
  • We discussed Python 3.11 and PEP 680 on episode 273
• Real Python has a great introduction for TOML in Python: Python and TOML: New Best Friends
  • TOML as a config format, key-value pairs, data types
  • using both tomli and tomllib
  • Loading TOML documents into Python
  • And like, writing, and updating toml docs programatically, which, although cool, I think the bulk of users can kinda skip over. But the the first 3 sections are an excellent reference.
  • Tables are cool, with [name] and [name.subsection] syntax, as well as arrays of tables with [[name]] syntax. I didn’t know how to do that before this article.

Michael #3: Pydantic V2 Plan

• via Douglas Nichols and John Thagen
• A very detailed plan
• Goal to have all this done by the end of October, definitely by the end of the year.
• Samuel Colvin take a sabbatical to work on this (sound familiar?)
• Some details highlighted by John:
  • Moving the core logic to Rust to drastically increase performance (17x) https://pydantic-docs.helpmanual.io/blog/pydantic-v2/#performance
  • Strict mode (something I've wanted for a long time): https://pydantic-docs.helpmanual.io/blog/pydantic-v2/#strict-mode
  • Cleaning up required vs nullable: https://pydantic-docs.helpmanual.io/blog/pydantic-v2/#required-vs-nullable-cleanup
  • Naming cleanup: https://pydantic-docs.helpmanual.io/blog/pydantic-v2/#model-namespace-cleanup
• This is a huge change, but overall it looks very promising for the community. It will likely require refactors by downstream users, so pinning pydantic using Poetry/pip-tools etc like always is a good idea.
• Many things have Pydantic at the core, so this matters, including:
  • FastAPI
  • Beanie
  • SQLModel
  • Pydastic
  • …

Brian #4: pikepdf

• a Python library for reading and writing PDF files
• Based on QPDF, which is written in C++.
• Features:
  • Supports password protected PDFs
  • Creates linearized ("fast web view") PDFs
  • Integrates with Jupyter and IPython notebooks for rapid development
• Some cool uses
  • copy pates from one PDF into another
  • split and merge PDFs
  • extract content
  • replace content, such as replacing images, without altering the rest of the file.
• Documentation mentions that if you only want to write PDFs, consider other libs, such as reportlab.

Extras

Brian:

• pytest-check
  • I’ve set up 2fa for my account, so now I have no excuse for not looking into feature requests and merge requests for pytest-check, other than like all the other things I’m doing.
  • I don’t have data for the top 3,500 for the last 6 months, but there is a list of the top 5,000 for last 30 days.
  • pytest-check is #1677 in the last 30 days.
  • pytest is #72 on the same list.
  • pydantic is #117
  • There are 57 pytest plugins that show up in the top 3,500 python packages. (packages that start with “pytest-”)
  • pytest-check is #20 of those. I guess it’s time to do another top plugins episode of Test & Code.

Joke:

• Error, OK, I’ll check the logs