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Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

I’m a little surprised at this point that Apple still doesn’t include a default Python 3.x on macOS. It’s the single thing keeping me from moving (as there’s a big difference between “just run this” and “first download this, then run this”).

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Downloading it is definitely not the biggest hurdle to moving to python 3.

I infer GP was talking about his users on OSX, who would have to download/install python3 to use the distributed software.

There are arguments against doing anything against system python installs in the first place.

My theory is that this is not going to be a nice change when they drop 2.7. Maybe one version will be released with both installed by default, then they'll use only 3.7/3.8 for the next decade. MacOS doesn't seem to care a lot about backwards compatibility recently.

This is of course pure speculation...

Other OSes just install a “python3” binary, I’d expect Apple to do the same.

Sure. What I'm saying is I expect python/python2 to be gone soon after that.

I’m not so sure; /System/Library/Frameworks links for Python versions have been stable for a very long time (which surprised me at first but I imagine Apple has plenty of stuff of their own that uses Python). Even though they’ve since hacked a lot of the older versions with symbolic links to 2.7, versions back to 2.3 have valid paths.

Honestly the fact that they include a system Python 2 is a huge pain. You can't add packages to it, and you shouldn't add another Python 2 interpreter to the PATH. You end up having to use virtualenv which is a stupid hack.

pip takes a --user flag that installs packages to your user's account. It's essentially global unless you have multiple users on your machine.

But there is no pip.

I used PyInstaller for the first time this week to build a single binary executable for Linux. So far in limited use the result has been great. I think I'm gonna do OS X next.

I agree, though it's not just macOS: all of the BSDs are behind on Python 3. Once FreeBSD gets Python 3 by default, I bet macOS will follow.

Current FreeBSD Python 3 status: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Python

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