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because many folks just want a single binary and not a full language library

If you are using whateverq and writing a shell script, everyone else using it needs to have whateverq installed as well....

Unless you bundle the whateverq alongside the shell script. Which is a primary design advantage of single small statically-built binaries.

That's true, but isn't that kind of a hassle on both sides?

Just encode and append the binary to the script: