Coconut VS BinaryBuilder.jl

> to be part of the Python ecosystem

I'd rather use Python if I'm in the Python ecosystem. So many attempts were made in the past to make a new language compatible with the Python ecosystem (look up hylang and coconu -- https://github.com/evhub/coconut). But at the end of the day, I'd come back to Python because if there's one thing I've learnt in recent years it's this:

    minimize dependencies at all costs.

Have you had a look at Coconut? I don't know if it'll push all your buttons but whenever I hear someone who's reasonably content with Python but wants more FP goodies I always think of it. https://github.com/evhub/coconut . It's basically a superset of Python3 that transpiles into Python3 and is compatible with MyPy. I don't think I'd code Python w/o it ever again assuming I had the choice. The biggest negative for me is that there's no IDE support for the language last I looked, though of course you can work with the transpiler output (plain Python) in your favorite Python IDE. It might be fun to play around with, I know that I really enjoyed it but then I got spoiled by the language+tooling of Scala3, but if you don't have that option ...

If you're looking for suggestions I want to put forward zig lang if you like C/C++ and Coconut Lang if you like Python!

F# and also the fun, compile-to-Python, functional language called Coconut.

There are some efforts and the startup times are getting better with every release and there's BinaryBuilder.jl.

There is the Julia package https://github.com/JuliaPackaging/BinaryBuilder.jl which creates an environment that fakes being another, but with the correct compilers and SDKs . It's used to build all the binary dependencies

https://binarybuilder.org/. You can do it manually obviously, but this is easier.

> The main pain point is probably the lack of standard, multi-environment packaging solutions for natively compiled code.

Are you talking about something like BinaryBuilder.jl[1], which provides native binaries as julia-callable wrappers?

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[1] https://binarybuilder.org

Julia did that for binary dependencies for a few years, with adapters for several linux platforms, homebrew, and for cross-compiled RPMs for Windows. It worked, to a degree -- less well on Windows -- but the combinatorial complexity led to many hiccups and significant maintenance effort. Each Julia package had to account for the peculiarities of each dependency across a range of dependency versions and packaging practices (linkage policies, bundling policies, naming variations, distro versions) -- and this is easier in Julia than in (C)Python because shared libraries are accessed via locally-JIT'd FFI, so there is no need to eg compile extensions for 4 different CPython ABIs (Julia also has syntactic macros which can be helpful here).

To provide a better experience for both package authors and users, as well as reducing the maintenance burden, the community has developed and migrated to a unified system called BinaryBuilder (https://binarybuilder.org) over the past 2-3 years. BinaryBuilder allows targeting all supported platforms with a single build script and also "audits" build products for common compatibility and linkage snafus (similar to some of the conda-build tooling and auditwheel). There was a nice talk at AlpineConf recently (https://alpinelinux.org/conf/) covering some of this history and detailing BinaryBuilder, although I'm not sure how to link into the video.

All that to say: it can work to an extent, but it has been tried various times before. The fact that conda and manylinux don't use system packages was not borne out of inexperience, either. The idea of "make binaries a distro packager's problem" sounds like a simplifying step, but that doesn't necessarily work out.