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Comment by sauere | Hacker News Reader

For me, this is not about execution speed AT ALL. I wouldnt even mind if it was slower.

It is about being able to have a easy, dead-simple way to provide Windows users with a executable. Without changing my code, without weird build systems. Like it or not, Windows users are still the majority out there.

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I like the Lisp world's term "delivery" for this part, where you package up an application to ship to end-users. Optimization can be one part of delivery, but not necessarily the most important part.

Is that not py2exe's job?

In theory. In reality, python freezers have a lot of problems. It can be a real hassle to get a single file, and even if you do they turn out massive. I've had nothing but problems with them in the past.

I've had good experiences with PyInstaller, if you haven't tried it yet (or recently).

Seconded. I recently moved a work project from py2exe to pyInstaller and was very happy with the results.

I'd be happy if the setuptools bdist installer could create a single file that works in 32 and 64-bit Windows and would take care of running 2to3 during the install. The situation now is too painful for me to bother making Windows installers any more.

Exactly. I recently wanted to build a task tracking app for the company I work at. I initially decided on writing it in Python as a server-based app (Flask + SQLAlchemy) since I am familiar with it. Once I found out how damn difficult it is for end users to actually deploy the app, I opted for node-webkit (Backbone.js + nedb) instead. I definitely have no regrets.

Similar to Go IIRC, the binaries aren't slim, but it's one push away from deployment and was advertised as a feature.

I agree. In fact, I think that the slowness of Python implementations is a feature. It forces developers to use standard libraries, which in turn makes the program more concise. This is certainly the case in MATLAB where vectorization is pretty much needed for non-trivial programs, and this leads to improved readability.

Slowness may have unintended benefits, but also forces you to use C code where you otherwise might have been OK

Which makes it hard to upgrade the language .. especially if you change the C interface at the same time as you change the language.

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