OpenAI is acquiring Astral, the startup whose tools quietly run inside the workflows of millions of Python developers. The deal drops Astral's team into the Codex group, and the timing is not subtle: ...

Python programs are set to get faster startup times with PEP 810 "Explicit lazy imports," which allows scripts to defer loading imported libraries until they're actually needed rather than at startup.

Startup time in Python on a busy NFS device or parallel filesystem (GPFS, Lustre, etc) is particularly painful. If you strace the startup you can watch it stat hundreds of files. If you start using ...