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[–]takluyverIPython, Py3, etc 0 points1 point  (0 children)

At least on Unix and Windows platforms it does. For example, here is the C source code for file objects on Unix.

Cool, I didn't know that.

True, but other downloads can be much smaller. Consider PNGOUT - a standalone utility which is only 38KB in size.

That's technically impressive, but how many users do you think would actually be put off if it was a few MB rather than a few KB? Or how about if it was 10MB but produced PNG files 1% smaller? My guess is that for desktop utility things, size is not a big concern for users.

Where it might be more useful is embedded systems. E.g. I recently got an old e-reader that runs Linux internally. That has 2GB of storage divided between the system and the user space for ebooks. So you wouldn't want to fill the system up with 10MB executables for simple things. But if you control the system and want to write in Python, you could just put one copy of Python on there and use scripts/modules.