honestly I bet a big portion of why that works is that they're statically linked binaries, but "ships as one statically linked binary" doesn't have quite the same marketing power. One of the first things I do when I check out an open source project is check if it's written in or requires node.js, and if it does, I ignore the project. I've worked with enough node.js stuff over the years to know that I simply do not want to deal with its ecosystem. I feel the same way about Ruby but I can't remember the last time I saw a new Ruby project. If I have to deal with managing an interpreter, I don't want to use your project. Python only gets a pass because I still use it professionally so I am personally up to date on its quirks, but I can understand why someone would say the same thing about Python projects.