bartc wrote:
The 'one-file' idea is one approach to simplifying the building of open-source applications. Probably, it's more suited to those who just want to try out, or use, a bit of software.
But on Windows, that use case is normally covered by installing a *binary*, not compiling from source. If the developer is in a position to supply a source distribution that's pre-configured to compile on Windows with no further effort, then it's only one small step for him to compile it himself and distribute the binary.
(The GMP library, for example, has no official binary releases. You have to build from source,
So using it on Windows isn't supported very well. This is in contrast to Python, for which a pretty comprehensive set of Windows binaries *is* available.
A one-file CPython might be under 250Kloc, not too bad to play with, but I'm not sure it would work as there are multiple binary files to build, not a single executable.
The number of files isn't really the issue. The point is that it wouldn't really be source in the sense of something human-editable. If you're not going to edit it, then it might as well be a binary. -- Greg -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
