But the reality is a bit different . The article states that their result is slow and passes one third of the regression tests. So it's a proof of concept, not a portable executable one can use for real-world projects.
As Cosmopolitan Libc has evolved, it has been possible to compile more software without modifications, and that includes latest Python through a project called superconfigure[1].
Last person who tried to reproduce it from scratch did it last week (granted it too them a few days of solid work) but in the end they ended with a portable binary with Python 3.11.9, brotli, ssl and asyncio for their work related project.[2]
[0] https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/tree/master/third_party... [1] https://github.com/ahgamut/superconfigure/ [2] https://github.com/croqaz/cpython/
Double so since Python code (.py) is itself portable, and I would assume that the amount of work to make all the necessary extension be built into your APE vs just using the standard pip/pipenv/poetry/etc to be in favor of the latter.
Not even talking about the maintainability of the resulting system by other people who'd have to learn how to handle building an APE.
In my use case, the niche is not having WSL/Docker available and letting end users repeat studies or re-run configuration scripts.