facebookincubator

xar

Python2018–2024

facebookincubator / xar · Archived

xar

executable archive format

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11Distinct people

11Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

1.6KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

executable archive format

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

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Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year11 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-07-13 22:51:10 UTC to 2024-11-16 14:48:05 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Submissions	Comments
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	6	1	5
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	0	2
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1

What Hacker News says

11 sources

redleader55·Nov 16, 2024

You might find interesting looking at XAR[0] which works by mounting a squashfs filesystem of the "archive", instead of using a zip file. The squashfs is mounted/unmounted "lazily" meaning if you run it a few times in a row it will only mount it one time. [0] -https://github.com/facebookincubator/xar

In Pex: A tool for generating .pex (Python EXecutable) files, lock files and venvs

cricalix·Jan 21, 2022

There’s https://github.com/facebookincubator/xar - but cross platform could be a pain. Basically static link “binary” for Python (or other).

In Make Your Python CLI Tools Pop with Rich

Twisol·Dec 18, 2020

XAR, perchance? https://github.com/facebookincubator/xar

In What If OpenDocument Used SQLite? (2014)

ipsum2·Dec 13, 2019

Another one: https://github.com/facebookincubator/xar "XAR lets you package many files into a single self-contained executable file. This makes it easy to distribute and install... A popular example is Python application archives that include all Python source code files, as well as native shared libraries, configuration files, other data."

In Poetry – Dependency Management for Python – v1.0

goodside·Jun 26, 2019

Also see Facebook’s XAR: https://github.com/facebookincubator/xar

In Building Standalone Python Applications with PyOxidizer

madhadron·Dec 19, 2018

The best solution I am aware of is to package your Python apps statically with the version they expect. For example, Facebook's XAR format (https://github.com/facebookincubator/xar/) does this very nicely.

In What, No Python in RHEL 8 Beta?

joshuamorton·Aug 3, 2018

There's also xar[1] (and similar things like par), which provide similar functionality in python in a managed way. Usage would be python foo/setup.py bdist_xar && scp foo/dist/foo.xar user@server if my understanding is correct. [1]: https://github.com/facebookincubator/xar

In Goodbye Python, Hello Go

Alir3z4·Aug 3, 2018

XAR lets you package many files into a single self-contained executable file. This makes it easy to distribute and install. https://github.com/facebookincubator/xar/ Then just build your XAR executable with: $ python setup.py bdist_xar

In Goodbye Python, Hello Go

devmacrile·Jul 20, 2018

This was circulating around HN a few days ago: https://github.com/facebookincubator/xar

In Python has brought computer programming to a vast new audience

meowface·Jul 19, 2018

Those are all valid gripes, but for most use-cases (where performance isn't critical), I haven't found anything better than Python yet. Ruby is an aesthetically nicer language and doesn't have those issues you mentioned in the first paragraph, but the Python ecosystem is amazing and better than Ruby's IMO. And compared to most other languages Python still feels very clean, terse, and pretty to me. >multi-threading Most interpreted languages have a GIL, sadly. But yes, this is annoying. >dependencies management Annoying, but resolved in part with new projects like pipenv, and also still a big issue for other popular languages. >deployment Also helped by pipenv, and Facebook's xar (https://github.com/facebookincubator/xar) is new but looks promising. >no refactoring/static checking It's a dynamic language. But this is now possible to some e

Read the rest

xtent with type hints. >python 2 vs 3 They did screw this up, yeah. Python 3 fixes a ton of issues and is a better language, but the backwards incompatibility created way too many problems. >50 different kinds of strings There are 2 kinds: bytes and unicode. >APIs full of abbreviations which probably meant something to their creators 20 years ago Can you give some examples? This is an issue in a few of the old standard libraries, but even then it's not too common. This is way, way more prevalent in PHP and C than in Python.

In Python has brought computer programming to a vast new audience

aylmao·Jul 13, 2018Submission

Facebook XAR: executable archive format

2 points · Open discussion