Is it possible to compile a program written in Python?

Question

I am new to the Python programming language. I was wondering if it is possible to compile a program written in Python.

Answer 1

I think Compiling Python Code would be a good place to start:

Python source code is automatically compiled into Python byte code by the CPython interpreter. Compiled code is usually stored in PYC (or PYO) files, and is regenerated when the source is updated, or when otherwise necessary.

To distribute a program to people who already have Python installed, you can ship either the PY files or the PYC files. In recent versions, you can also create a ZIP archive containing PY or PYC files, and use a small “bootstrap script” to add that ZIP archive to the path.

To “compile” a Python program into an executable, use a bundling tool, such as Gordon McMillan’s installer (alternative download) (cross-platform), Thomas Heller’s py2exe (Windows), Anthony Tuininga’s cx_Freeze (cross-platform), or Bob Ippolito’s py2app (Mac). These tools puts your modules and data files in some kind of archive file, and creates an executable that automatically sets things up so that modules are imported from that archive. Some tools can embed the archive in the executable itself.

Answer 2

python compile on the fly when you run it.

Run a .py file by(linux): python abc.py

Answer 3

python is an interpreted language, so you don't need to compile your scripts to make them run. The easiest way to get one running is to navigate to it's folder in a terminal and execute "python somefile.py". This depends on you having python installed from the python site.

You can compile python apps, but that is generally not something a new developer needs to do initially. If that is what you're looking for, take a peek at py2exe. This will take your python script and package it up as an executable file like any program on your windows-based computer. You can also compile individual files using python, as described in the "Compiling Python modules to byte code" section at this site.

Answer 4

You dont have to compile it. the first you use it (import) it is compiled by the CPython interpreter. But if you really want to compile there are several options.

To compile to exe

• py2exe
• cx_Freeze
• py2app

Or 2 compile just a specific *.py file, you can just use

import py_compile
py_compile.compile("yourpythoncode.py")

Answer 5

Python, as a dynamic language, cannot be "compiled" into machine code statically, like C or COBOL can. You'll always need an interpreter to execute the code, which, by definition in the language, is a dynamic operation.

You can "translate" source code in bytecode, which is just an intermediate process that the interpreter does to speed up the load of the code, It converts text files, with comments, blank spaces, words like 'if', 'def', 'in', etc in binary code, but the operations behind are exactly the same, in Python, not in machine code or any other language. This is what it's stored in .pyc files and it's also portable between architectures.

Probably what you need it's not "compile" the code (which it's not possible) but to "embed" an interpreter (in the right architecture) with the code to allow running the code without an external installation of the interpreter. To do that, you can use all those tools like py2exe or cx_Freeze.

Maybe I'm being a little pedantic on this :-P

Answer 6

If you really want, you could always compile with Cython. This will generate C code, which you can then compile with any C compiler such as GCC.