Why Python is not both an interpreter and a compiler?

Laura Creighton lac at openend.se
Tue Sep 1 03:51:10 EDT 2015


If I understand what you are saying, then I think what you are
looking for is not a compiler, but docker.
see: https://www.docker.com/
in particular https://www.docker.com/whatisdocker

PyPy used this to produce portable PyPy binaries.  See:
https://github.com/squeaky-pl/portable-pypy/blob/master/README.rst

Why did we need to make portable PyPy binaries?

>From the PyPy downloads page:

    Linux binaries and common distributions

    Linux binaries are dynamically linked, as is usual, and thus might
    not be usable due to the sad story of linux binary
    compatibility. This means that Linux binaries are only usable on
    the distributions where they were created unless you're ready to hack
    your system by adding symlinks to the libraries it tries to open.

We had to make versions for debian stable and unstable, and all the
different versions of RHEL, and Centos, and Suse and .... every time
we turned around somebody made a new linux distribution, with new and
different versions of shared libraries, located in some new creative
idea of where the best place was to put such things.  And we had to make 32
bit and 64 bit versions, and versions for x86 and for ARM and the list
went on, and on, and on.  This made releases far harder than they
needed to be, and, from the user end meant that people had to work
rather hard just to figure out what version of pypy they should
download from our site.   Lots of people never could quite figure
it out, though we tried to help them on the pypy mailing list and
over irc ...

So finally, we used docker to make a portable version of pypy, which
you can use to biuld your own version of pypy from the nightly
sources, for instance.

I think that this is what you are looking for, as well.  But go read
up on docker and see if it suits.

Laura



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