Bummer about Python :/ it’s my go-to for CLI tools, but I’ve seen that problem too.. pipenv helps, but I wonder if there’s a better way to package them so they’re more future proof.. or do I really need to learn go?
For packaging python stuff, it kind of depends who or what the end user of the CLI tool is. I used to work in a small business that shipped windows desktop software to customers, a lot of the software was written in python. From memory we packaged it with py2exe -- so you end up building a zip file containing a self-contained executable, the version of the python interpreter your tool needs, along with all the python packages as well as native libraries. That worked quite reliably, but it'd seem rather distasteful to use that approach for sharing CLI tools with your colleagues or CI machines in a dev team!
edit: there are pitfalls to deploying go application binaries if you try to put them in scratch containers and use libraries that assume they can find data such as timezone data provided in the usual place in the filesystem by the distribution (there will be no such data files in a scratch container unless you explicitly copy them in), or build a go linux binary with dynamic linking assuming glibc, then try to run it in an alpine based environment with musl. So it's not magic. But it's mostly pretty nice.
If you know that, this is not the problem for you.
Often you do not know that. Then this is a huge problem.
If you're concerned about compile time -- Go does a pretty reasonable job of caching (including caching unit test results). If you're working on a Python project with a large number of unit tests, because Python is so slow to execute anything, and the go build and test tools are quite fast, it wouldn't be that surprising if it was actually faster to compile and run the test suite in Go vs running the test suite in Python -- particularly for incremental work where you make a change in one library and rerun the impacted tests.
If you're concerned more about the workflow of needing an additional compile step, go has `go run script.go` which lets you use go like a scripting language, assuming you're in an environment with the go toolchain installed.
Now you've given your users 2 issues completely unrelated to the problem they're trying to solve. If you can't give your users a single simple command, or a single file to download your tool is too complicated to install.
My point being to the users of the products we create, software licensing is not what they are thinking about.
>Yes. Except. If I have a Python2 tool I paid $X for, and now I need to to change it for $Y because, because, because no reason. Tough luck! Stop "whining" and write a cheque!
pkg.go.dev and gopls also automate away most of the "exploration" I would be doing in Python REPL.
Hey you can always use docker for shipping /s