Packaging and stability reasons. Same for why it’s a 1.7gb install - probably where they landed after having tons of support issues on some random Python version they didn’t test or some issue with a dependency that had that issue. Freezing the entire set of artifacts is more stable and Python lets you move pretty quick. I can’t speak to why nodejs vs Python though - maybe Python is easier to embed?
Yeah, I imagine that was the decision calculus. "Instead of spending some more effort to save millions of unnecessary downloads of python's runtime using a different language, let's just bundle Python!"
I wouldn't be surprised if it was version 2.7 too...
What? They only get package and stability because they include the runtime. If they just went with a compiled language they could distribute native binaries and have actual packaging and stability.
Yes, but it’s not just a single metric. Another is how easy it is for them to hire productive members of the team and how much that costs them - middling Python developers churning out fine”ish” code are cheaper than Rust developers doing the same. It’s hard to find a language where you can be as productive as a developer in Python that also has AOT compilation to generate standalone binaries.
Tldr: there’s multiple factors to consider here and it’s more interesting to understand the pressures that cause the decisions, especially if you want to try to create a world where different decisions are made.
> It’s hard to find a language where you can be as productive as a developer in Python that also has AOT compilation to generate standalone binaries.
Outside specific cases around machine learning, it’s really not: Go is that language. It’s not like each of those platforms doesn’t have to have a similar team that understand Go anyway (for their SDK), so they could save their customers the abject pain of Python dependency management by just writing their CLIs using it.
