Self-contained highly-portable Python distributions
gregoryszorc.com
Self-contained highly-portable Python distributions
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Re: Self-contained highly-portable Python distributions
#2> Many users of these distributions might be better served by the PyOxy sister project [1]. PyOxy takes these Python distributions and adds some Rust code for enhancing the functionality of the Python interpreter. The official PyOxy release binaries are single file executables providing a full-featured Python interpreter.
1: https://github.com/indygreg/PyOxidizer/
From that readme, it seems PyOxy has a few related uses:
- It can produce a single file executable representing a Python app including the interpreter
- It can ship self-contained Python interpreters and related to be embedded or used as a library in a larger application
- PyOxidizer can serve as a bridge between Rust and Python - "PyOxidizer can be used to easily add a Python interpreter to any Rust project. But the opposite is also true: PyOxidizer can also be used to add Rust to Python."
Re: Self-contained highly-portable Python distributions
#3These distributions are excellent. Astral took over maintenance of them a while ago so technically they sit under OpenAI now.
https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone
If you're looking to bundle Python into another application - a macOS desktop app for example - these are exactly what you need.
Re: Self-contained highly-portable Python distributions
#4> Many users of these distributions might be better served by the PyOxy sister project [1]. PyOxy takes these Python distributions and adds some Rust code for enhancing the functionality of the Python interpreter. The official PyOxy release binaries are single file executables providing a full-featured Python interpreter. 1: https://github.com/indygreg/PyOxidizer/ From that readme, it seems PyOxy has a few related us…
That project seems to have been abandoned though. Last release was 4 years ago, and last commit was 2 years ago.
Re: Self-contained highly-portable Python distributions
#5> Many users of these distributions might be better served by the PyOxy sister project [1]. PyOxy takes these Python distributions and adds some Rust code for enhancing the functionality of the Python interpreter. The official PyOxy release binaries are single file executables providing a full-featured Python interpreter. 1: https://github.com/indygreg/PyOxidizer/ From that readme, it seems PyOxy has a few related us…
It kind of worked, but had some problems, like mostly targeted to mac os (probably the dev env) but not so much with linux. And could maybe do to much, with a flaky configuration in https://starlark-lang.org/. I've spend some hours trying to make it work for my use case, but it ended beeing wasted time...
Re: Self-contained highly-portable Python distributions
#6These are the Python distributions we use in uv (https://github.com/astral-sh/uv), i.e., when you install Python with uv, you're installing from python-build-standalone. (Same goes for many of the other tools that can install Python for you, like pipx, Hatch, Poetry, Bazel, etc.)
Most of our engineering time on the project over the past ~year and a half has been split into three buckets:
1. Keeping up with upstream CPython. (We're also hoping to upstream as much of this work as we can into CPython itself.)
2. Fixing any / all of the known "quirks" vis-a-vis CPython.
3. Making these distributions as fast as (or faster than) any other CPython distribution.
If you're interested, I wrote a bit about the why / how here when we took over maintenance of the project: https://x.com/charliermarsh/status/1864050698574311561
Re: Self-contained highly-portable Python distributions
#7There is also the APE/Cosmopolitan cross platform binaries, which includes a python. Yes, cross platform binaries. The binaries run "natively on Linux + Mac + Windows + FreeBSD + OpenBSD 7.3 + NetBSD + BIOS with the best possible performance and the tiniest footprint imaginable."
* Python Source: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/tree/master/third_party...
* Python Binary: https://cosmo.zip/pub/cosmos/bin/python which is ~ 40MB.
Apparently you can zip your .py files in with the python binary and make it run, but I haven't had a chance to try and play with that yet.
Re: Self-contained highly-portable Python distributions
#8There is also the APE/Cosmopolitan cross platform binaries, which includes a python. Yes, cross platform binaries. The binaries run "natively on Linux + Mac + Windows + FreeBSD + OpenBSD 7.3 + NetBSD + BIOS with the best possible performance and the tiniest footprint imaginable." * Python Source: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/tree/master/third_party... * Python Binary: https://cosmo.zip/pub/cosmos/bin/python w…
speaking of Cosmopolitan, is postgres supported within Cosmopolitan. I would like to know because I would love a static cross platform postgres
Re: Self-contained highly-portable Python distributions
#9The important distinction is that self-contained doesn’t mean one binary that runs everywhere...does it?
A virtualenv still depends on the host interpreter and OS. These distributions pin the interpreter, standard library, and most runtime dependencies, but the remaining boundary is where production surprises happen:
- glibc version, CPU feature level, and third-party native extensions.
The musl builds remove libc dependencies, for example, but can’t load ordinary `.so` extensions.
I understand why it's important for uv to maintain this as it provides a reproducible Python base while making the platform-specific extension layer an explicit part of the deployment decision
Re: Self-contained highly-portable Python distributions
#10What is this sudden revived Astral marketing?
Did Astral's package cache proxy or another part cause the OpenAI/Huggingface incident?