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Comment by moe | Hacker News Reader

I love how these new languages compile into a static binary and thereby avoid the deployment nightmares of Ruby/Python.

More of that please!

If Common Lisp, Scheme or Dylan had been adopted by mainstream programmers, dynamic languages with JIT/AOT compilers would already be a common practice instead of only available to a few that care to look around.

I came across [pex](https://github.com/pantsbuild/pex) a while ago. It basically compiles your package and all its dependencies into a single zipped module.

I never had the opportunity to try it out myself though.

If PEP-441[1] makes it to Python 3.5, pex like functionality will be a part of the standard library.

[1]: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0441/

It's not quite the same I think. The format is very similar, yes, and I think it'd be nice if the PEX program could be made to work with this PEP. However, the PEX program bundles dependencies, which this PEP doesn't seem to be explicitly about.

py2app and py2exe are fairly solid in this regard, aren't they?

No experience with py2app, but I've used py2exe and pyinstaller in production.

They can be made to work, but you regularly stumble on some more or less obscure bugs. The short of it, is that you have no guarantee that the compilation step won't introduce bugs in your program, so you need a solid test suite for the compiled binary. It's feasible, but clunky, and you really get the feeling that the compilers aren't first-class citizens.

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