pex

Don't know if I agree about the goto thing, but there are actually a number of options now for delivering varying degrees of self-contained Python executable. When I evaluated the landscape a few years ago, I settled on PEX [1] as the solution that happened to fit my use-case the best— it uses a system-provided Python + stdlib, but otherwise brings everything (including compiled modules) with it in a self-extracting executable. Other popular options include pyinstaller and cx_freeze, which have different tradeoffs as far as size, speed, convenience, etc. [1]: https://github.com/pantsbuild/pex

Somewhat related, I had a devil of a time a little bit ago trying to ship a small Python app as a fully standalone environment runnable on "any Linux" (but for practical purposes, Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04, and 20.04). It turns out that if you don't want to use pip, and you don't want to build separate bundles for different OSes and Python versions, it can be surprisingly tricky to get this right. Just bundling the whole interpreter doesn't work either because it's tied to a particular stdlib which is then linked to specific versions of a bunch of system dependencies, so if you go that route, you basically end up taking an entire rootfs/container with you. After evaluating a number of different solutions, I ended up being quite happy with pex: https://github.com/pantsbuild/pex It basically bundles up the wheels for whatever your workspace needs