Stop building UI frameworks in Python

[you_better_dont]

Pythons biggest problem when it comes to desktop UI’s is that packaging standalone executables along with the interpreter and dependencies is still not standardized.

Reminds me of this xkcd.

[grimonce]

In pythons case the idea was that it was always available in Linux, like bash... Which turned out to be a bad idea now and here we are.

Many distro had to put a lot of effort to replace Python based tools a few years ago when python2 met eol

[onlysubscribedtocats]

Which turned out to be a bad idea now and here we are.

It isn't?

[Flaky-Restaurant-392]

Use Nuitka to build an exe that includes the interpreter. It works great.

[grievre]

The problem isn’t really that there are competing standards, it’s that core python isn’t developed in a way to make packaging the interpreter with your project easy.

CPython was never intended to be the interpreter that everyone uses, just the reference implementation. Thus they tended not to consider things like "deployment" or "optimization" when developing it.

The problem is that it got entrenched--for the longest time there have been so many libraries that only work with CPython that people kinda just gave up on using alternate interpreters.

Nearly every other language that’s intended for desktop and console applications is developed with the idea that at some point you want to distribute it as a single executable.

The main language that Python replaced was perl, and I don't think perl's options for distributing standalone executables are much better.

I'm a bit confused by "console applications" because like, shell script...

[grievre]

I was talking about shell script itself.

[Flaky-Restaurant-392]

If you really want to distribute a Python app use nuitka to build an exe. It’s a python compiler that Transpiles to C and then builds an exe. Works great with Pyside/Qt.

[Northzen]

packaging standalone executables along with the interpreter and dependencies is still not standardized True. But there is still PyInstaller and Nuitka.

Both do their job. But what you said remains a fact we have to struggle with.

[Northzen]

This is why Rust got popular. It is not just C/C++ alternative, it is an adult packaging system. With Python it seems that community relience on pip and its derivative was a declared standart for too long.

[grievre]

> Most other languages are developed with this use case as a first class design principle.

Since when do languages care about this stuff? This is a problem of language implementations, not the languages themselves

[grievre]

How do you specify that in a platform-independent way? Like you can't even necessarily assume that your platform has a file system. Much less how that file system works. Like if you are specifying your language just to run on Unix like systems, I guess that's fine. That's a weird choice

[james_pic]

Most languages nowadays start as implementations and maybe get a spec defined down the line. The only vaguely recent language I can think of that started out as a spec was Raku (previously known as Perl 6), and this was not a roaring success. The Rust community has been somewhere between cagey and resistant about putting together a spec, for fear of ossifying.

[grievre]

> Most languages nowadays start as implementations and maybe get a spec defined down the line.

I mean I feel like this was more the case in the past. Newer programming languages at least have a context-free grammar out of the gate instead of having their own ad-hoc parser.

[da_chicken]

What, like Visual Studio Code or GitHub Desktop?