If this is so desirable, why haven't people been shipping open source C and C++ software this way? It's not like Go invented static linking.
Not just C and C++, either -- Python, Ruby etc software could be shipped as statically linked executables.
Not just C and C++, either -- Python, Ruby etc software could be shipped as statically linked executables.
Static linking is sometimes discouraged because it makes it harder to identify what needs to be upgraded in case of (for example) security vulnerables in core libraries like libc.
Could you elaborate on how Python software can be shipped as a statically linked executable? I'm not familiar an easy way to do that, and it would help me quite a bit.
For example, PyInstaller itself changes drastically from version-to-version, and I've previously had to spend hours picking away at why "compiled" Grow worked before but no longer works post-PyInstaller updates.
Overall happy though, and much happier to write in Python and distribute a single executable without requiring folks to muck around with Python versions, pip, dependencies, etc.
PS: I'm the original author of PyInstaller. I obviously love it but it's a gross hack around the fact that Python doesn't have a serious distribution story.