python-build-standalone

> If python interpreters masqueraded as versioned .so libraries You can in fact get them in pretty much that form (of course they also include a ton of .py files for the standard library); see https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone .

These 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.

> If I understand correctly, the source code for building Python is not fetched directly from python.org. Not so sure how secure is that. python-build-standalone fetches CPython sources directly from python.org[1]. I don't even know where else we would get them from! [1]: https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone/blob/a2...

This week I was wondering whether using uv for managing Python versions is a good idea. From their website [1] > Python does not publish official distributable binaries. As such, uv uses distributions from the Astral python-build-standalone project. See the Python distributions documentation for more details. It points to this GitHub repo https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone which mentions this other link https://gregoryszorc.com/docs/python-build-standalone/main/r... If I understand correctly, the source code for building Python is not fetched directly from python.org. Not so sure how secure is that. I have the same concern for asdf [2]. However, they use pyenv [3] which, I think, feels more official. Can someone clarify this? Which tool is better/more secure for installing python: uv or asdf? [1] https://docs.astral.sh/u

Curious how well upstream contributors or projects get contributed for these sort of headline-gathering acquisitions (probably not at all, unfortunately). OpenClaw notably was built around Mario Zechner's pi[0]; uv I believe was highly adapted from Armin Ronacher's rye[1], and uses indygreg's python-build-standalone[2] for distributing Python builds (both of which were eventually transferred to Astral). [0]: https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono [1]: https://github.com/astral-sh/rye [2]: https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone

No, uv installs pythons available from https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone by default, which are quite good and have a wide variety of versions available, even on unusual platforms. If those don’t suit your needs, uv can be configured to use (and in some cases install or download, though that gets hairy) other versions you have installed yourself: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/concepts/python-versions/#managed-...

For Python, take a look at the musl builds in python-build-standalone[1], which are statically linked. I also have a tiny collection of statically linked utilities available here[2]. [1] https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone [2] https://github.com/supriyo-biswas/static-builds

Yeah it has precompiled Python binaries. They're custom standalone builds of CPython: https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone You can also import existing Python versions into uv, for example on my Mac it has imported the Homebrew versions.

Trying to assess the performance of a python build is extremely difficult as there are a lot of build tricks you can do to improve it. Recently the astral folks ran into this showing how the conda-forge build is notable faster than most others: https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone/pull/54... I'd be interested to know how the tail-call interpreter performs with other build optimisations that exist.

This must have moved recently! I looked at this around end of December and it was hosted on https://github.com/indygreg/python-build-standalone/releases which had nothing to do with UV. If you read through the docs now it still references indygreg and still shows this https://github.com/indygreg/python-build-standalone so I guess the move has not completed it, but yes it's a positive change to see UV taking ownership of the builds.

https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone is by the same people as uv, so it's hardly random. The releases there include ones with profile-guided optimisation and link time optimisation [1], which are used by default for some platforms and Python versions (and work seems underway to make them usable for all [2]). I don't see any recommendation against using their binaries or mention of optimising for portability at the cost of performance on the page you link or the pages linked from it that I've looked at. [1] https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/blob/main/crates/uv-python/d... (search for pgo) [2] https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/issues/8015

Really? I was told Mint was supposed to be the kiddie-pool version of Linux, but it gave me GCC and a bunch of common dependencies anyway. (By my understanding, `pyenv install` will expect to be able to run a compiler to build a downloaded Python source tarball. Uv uses prebuilt versions from https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone ; there is work being done in the Python community on a standard for packaging such builds, similarly to wheels, so that you can just use that instead of compiling it yourself. But Python comes out of an old culture where users expect to do that sort of thing.)

It is young, and it does use established tools under the hood, but I think you should take another look: - It manages the portable python version downloads depending on what you've pinned in your pyproject or the standard version: https://github.com/indygreg/python-build-standalone - It uses Hatch, uv (or piptools), venv etc. - It has a sane set of commands and should work even if they swap out some of the underlying tools. - Its fast and has a great coverage of PEPs. I've used it now for a few versions and I think its the best meta-packaging/python management tool out there. I