I agree, but it's still way easier than the original story, which is the one you also have with PHP, Ruby, JS, etc.
Using an interpretted language always leads to this.
I know no popular interpretted language with a seamless experience to ship a standalone exe.
In fact, Python is probably the one with the best story here, since it has nuitka (https://nuitka.net/), which allows to compile Python code into a fully standalone exe.
But then you need to install a compiler, headers, etc. And no cross compilation of course. Not to mention on Linux, you have to ensure you target the lowest version of libc you can.
You are still very far from Go or Rust, and I'm hoping one day that RustPython will succeed because that would mean an amazing deployment story.
Meanwhile, you trade the ease of deployment of compiled languages for the ease of development of interpretted ones.
I think it's a fare trade for most people: you dev the program much more often that you deploy it.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't work, as a community, to improve the deployment story. It's a serious hindrance.
Rust has a fantastic deployment story: compiling a rust program is super easy, and you can cross compile. Using cargo and rustc is a breath of fresh air compared to any similar experience with C compiling.
So if one day RustPython gets compatible enought with CPython that you can use it as a drop in replacement, you can start creating a tool that compiles any Python VM for any target, and bring along your program with it. Making a standalone version of it would become much easier.
Right now, doing so either requires you to bring in a pre-compile version of cpython for your target (which is what briefcase does) or compile the thing yourself with gcc + headers + deps(which is what nuitka does).
> So if one day RustPython gets compatible enought with CPython that you can use it as a drop in replacement
I don't think this will ever happen unless the community converges on a standard C-extension interface. Presently Python leans so hard on C-extensions, but there is no standard interface--if you're writing a C-extension library, you just depend on whatever obscure corner of CPython that suits your purpose. If you're writing an alternative Python interpreter, you have to implement the entire surface area of CPython, which generally means you must implement CPython exactly and you are severely restricted on the improvements you can make. At that point, why even bother?
Fortunately, I think there are emerging candidate interfaces, but the community needs to either update C-extension packages to use those interfaces or support packages (and maintainers) who already do. https://github.com/pyhandle/hpy.
There are probably only a dozen of c popular extensions that needs to support HPY reach the tipping point of mass adoption: numpy, scipy, pycuda, tensorflow, matplotlib, uvloop, etc. and some db drivers.
The rest is not popular enought to be a blocker. You will hear them scream a lot, but they will be like 0.00001% of the user base, and we can just tell them to stay on CPython with its limitations. They don't lose anything, just not gain anything either.
Those C extensions authors are directly in communication with Python core devs, when they are not core devs themselves, so if HPY is adopted, we can expect a total adoption under 5 years.
Numpy authors already said it would take 1 year to adopt it.
Give the huge number of benefits of HPY, I deeply hope it will be a success.
I'm not sure. I would certainly add psycopg2 to that list, since it's really the only well-supported way to speak to a Postgres database via Python. I imagine other database dialects will have similar issues. And there's probably a whole host of other prominent libraries that we're just not thinking about because we only run into them when we're trying to use something like Pypy, and even then we only run into one or two at a time before giving up and going back to CPython.
Using an interpretted language always leads to this.
I know no popular interpretted language with a seamless experience to ship a standalone exe.
In fact, Python is probably the one with the best story here, since it has nuitka (https://nuitka.net/), which allows to compile Python code into a fully standalone exe.
But then you need to install a compiler, headers, etc. And no cross compilation of course. Not to mention on Linux, you have to ensure you target the lowest version of libc you can.
You are still very far from Go or Rust, and I'm hoping one day that RustPython will succeed because that would mean an amazing deployment story.
Meanwhile, you trade the ease of deployment of compiled languages for the ease of development of interpretted ones.
I think it's a fare trade for most people: you dev the program much more often that you deploy it.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't work, as a community, to improve the deployment story. It's a serious hindrance.
That's the raison d'être of the Briefcase project (https://beeware.org/project/projects/tools/briefcase/). It's still in progress, but the last prez I saw on it was quite impressive already.