python-build-standalone

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

I just discovered it this morning and it works like a charm as an asdf replacement for my Python setup at work. It also replaces "just" as a task manager for me which is very pleasant. The fact that the python plugin uses precompiled Python binaries by default instead of building them from source remove common issues I had with the asdf's python plugin at work with missing dependencies. Just so you know, I encountered two little quirks that needed a fix: - "Backspace Key Doesn't work in Python REPL": https://github.com/indygreg/python-build-standalone/blob/mai... - An issue with the mise-poetry plugin: https://github.com/mise-plugins/mise-poetry/issues/9 I will see how it goes in the long run, but I really like it so far :)

These builds are an alternative: https://github.com/indygreg/python-build-standalone Those are what Rye and hatch use. Drawbacks: late availability of patch versions, various quirks from how they are built (missing readline, missing some build info that self-compiled C python modules might need.)

Bundling Python isn't too bad if you find the right tools for it. I really like https://github.com/indygreg/python-build-standalone and https://github.com/indygreg/PyOxidizer A bundled, built standalone Python can be 16 to 32MB (including the full standard library, which you can strip down to just the bits you use to save size). Not tiny, but probably not worth switching programming languages over.