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Comment by cdchn | Hacker News Reader

Making python scripts into an 'Actually Portable Executable' is what really interested me here.

Not just python scripts, you can package any C code as well. We've used it to compile up a "python.com" APE file with a python 3.11 interpreter that has lots of packages (including C extensions) that we can just drop straight into old airgapped lab instrument computers and get a modern python data analysis suite up and running.

That sounds very interesting! I probably could hack it together myself, but do you happen to have a writeup on that, or maybe some pointers on how to include the numpy-scipy stack into the executable?

Now integrate Shedskin the Python compiler. :)

Thanks, TIL. Now we can combine this with the xlcalculator package and transpile models built in Excel right down to C code and build it as a portable executable.

That's both terrifying and wonderful and I hope to see a write up of it on the front page one day :)

I'm a little confused by this part:

This executable is theoretically runnable on all major platforms without fuss. And the Docker container that we build with it [...]

It sounds like they're putting an APE inside a Docker container, but why would you want both?

Because some people throw a tantrum if it doesn't come pre-dockerized, I suppose

No, they build the APE with a docker container. The APE itself is... actually portable.

We do both. We also deploy a Docker container that runs scrapscript.com

perhaps to integrate with tooling that wants to work with containers

Yep, to deploy on fly.io

Is this the reason why there is only one 5+ KLOC module (which includes the tests)? I personally prefer short / shorter modules with clear responsibilities.

No. This is not a limitation of APE/Cosmopolitan. This is just my personal preference because imports get tricky in Python land unless you either have a single file or go Full Package Mode. There's probably a world where we split the tests out, though.

Well, just to better understand how the code is organized (and experiment a bit with it), I have forked it: https://github.com/sfermigier/scrapscript/tree/trunk/src/scr...

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