Self-contained highly-portable Python distributions

These are the Python distributions we use in uv (https://github.com/astral-sh/uv), i.e., when you install Python with uv, you're installing from python-build-standalone. (Same goes for many of the other tools that can install Python for you, like pipx, Hatch, Poetry, Bazel, etc.)

Most of our engineering time on the project over the past ~year and a half has been split into three buckets:

1. Keeping up with upstream CPython. (We're also hoping to upstream as much of this work as we can into CPython itself.)

2. Fixing any / all of the known "quirks" vis-a-vis CPython.

3. Making these distributions as fast as (or faster than) any other CPython distribution.

If you're interested, I wrote a bit about the why / how here when we took over maintenance of the project: https://x.com/charliermarsh/status/1864050698574311561

These distributions are excellent. Astral took over maintenance of them a while ago so technically they sit under OpenAI now.

https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone

If you're looking to bundle Python into another application - a macOS desktop app for example - these are exactly what you need.

> Many users of these distributions might be better served by the PyOxy sister project [1]. PyOxy takes these Python distributions and adds some Rust code for enhancing the functionality of the Python interpreter. The official PyOxy release binaries are single file executables providing a full-featured Python interpreter.

1: https://github.com/indygreg/PyOxidizer/

From that readme, it seems PyOxy has a few related uses:

- It can produce a single file executable representing a Python app including the interpreter

- It can ship self-contained Python interpreters and related to be embedded or used as a library in a larger application

- PyOxidizer can serve as a bridge between Rust and Python - "PyOxidizer can be used to easily add a Python interpreter to any Rust project. But the opposite is also true: PyOxidizer can also be used to add Rust to Python."