alt Hacker NewsThese 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
Replies
I install these Python builds into distroless containers with uv python install and it just works. (If you try this with Google’s images, use gcr.io/distroless/cc, libgcc/libstdc++ is needed for some extensions, like numpy)
At my employer, we'd been using a similar scheme to build and ship interpreters along with releases of various pieces of software for years. Although I was interested in p-b-s for some time, I was loathe to consider switching to it since one of the major motivations for building our own binaries was the collection of random obscure changes or customizations we'd accumulated in our build harness over the years, and the fact that we need to provide some guarantees about the provenance of the binaries.
Despite those needs though, I eventually looked into the p-b-s builder and found that I couldn't make a serious argument against continuing to maintain our builder and all of the random crap that's needed to manage all the dependencies and using p-b-s. It solves all the same problems and after having switched to it a couple of years ago, my initial concerns about possibly needing to get changes upstreamed never became an issue as your folks pretty much always run into and fix stuff before I do and have been both really pragmatic and helpful in any of the discussions surrounding issues. I keep hoping for an opportunity to contribute something back since the project has really saved me a great deal of toil over the past year or two since adopting it.
I really like the model of treating the interpreter as just another runtime dependency, and after working in the Erlang universe for a few years I keep thinking there are some interesting opportunities for tooling related to bundling stripped-down versions of the runtime stuff along with an application rather than some of the more exotic approaches. Stuff like rebar/erlang.mk might be a nice pattern to study.
Anyhow if Indygreg is reading this, huge thanks and nice work, and I really appreciate all the work you (Charlie) and the astral folks have put in, it's been a real bright spot at work for a while.