Why Python is not both an interpreter and a compiler?

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 6:08 AM, Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> wrote:
> Laura Creighton <lac at openend.se>:
>
>> But are Guile programs small?
>
> They can be tiny because libguile-2.0.so, the interpreter, is a dynamic
> library and is installed on the computer. It's barely different from how
> compiled C programs can be a few kilobytes in size because libc.so is
> dynamic.

And compiled C programs are notoriously hard to distribute. Can you
pick up a Guile binary and carry it to another computer? Do you have
to absolutely perfectly match the libguile version, architecture,
build settings, etc?

Also... how is this different from distributing .pyc files and
expecting people to have a Python interpreter?

ChrisA