iceberg VS pyenv

Details I didn't include but should have (I wasn't sure I'd have any replies at all... I should have had more faith, sorry)

It's a bit of a ramble, sorry about that.

MSTOICAL[0] is a fork of an old C based Forth variant, it took some help from the HN community[1] to get it to compile in a modern 64 bit environment, for which I am very thankful. However, it uses AutoConf to configure, build, install, etc... and I can't for the life of me figure out how to remove all of that logic. (C isn't my primary language, I'm willing to learn that, but adding AutoConf on top of it was too much)

In order to work on that, I was willing to switch to Linux (Ubuntu)... got everything up and running for the most part, but then I couldn't access WikidPad[2], my local Wiki with my appointments, etc. I missed a doctors appointment because of that, so went back to Windows.

The issue is around wxWindows changing the names of variables in some calls. On Windows, you just download an EXE installer and you're good to go. I couldn't figure it out because the program seems to be unwilling to support newer Python versions. (I could be wrong)

I don't understand why they felt the need to make breaking changes to wxWindows, and the python is a bit too dense for me.

So finally... I'm back in Windows 10, and decided to try to craft together a twitter clone with a bunch of weird ideas that I tossed out at 3:30 am in a twitter thread, and put into a more coherent manifesto.[3]

[0] https://github.com/mikewarot/mstoical

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30957273

[2] https://github.com/WikidPad/WikidPad

[3] https://github.com/mikewarot/iceberg/blob/main/MANIFESTO.md

If you have a requirement for multiple, specific Python versions, why not just use pyenv?

https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv

For more information visit: pyenv repository

Note that virtual environments assume you are using the same global version of Python. Often, this is not the case and additional tools like pyenv can be used alongside virtual environments when you need to switch between versions of Python itself on your local machine.

Python version manager pyenv

First of all, install the Python virtual environment from these links: 1 and 2. I developed my GPT-based API in Python version 3.8.18. Pick any Python versions >= 3.7.

Note: Most modern systems will probably have a system environment that meets this requirement, but if yours does not or if you prefer not to install anything in your system environment (even if it's just PDM) check out asdf or pyenv to help install and manage additional Python environments.

When dealing with software development, reproducibility is key. This is why we encourage you to use Python virtual environments to set up an isolated environment for your project. Virtual environments allow the isolation of dependencies, which plays a crucial role to avoid breaking compatibility between different projects. We cannot cover all the details about virtual environments in this post, but we encourage you to learn more about venv, pyenv or conda for a better understanding on how to create and manage virtual environments.

For Python, with your use case I would avoid system packages, no matter the distro. It sounds like it would be worth setting up pyenv and working exclusively with virtual environments.

For OSX there is homebrew or pyenv (pyenv is another solution on Linux). As pyenv compiles from source it will require setting up XCode (the Apple IDE) tools to support this which can be pretty bulky. Windows users have chocolatey but the issue there is it works off the binaries. That means it won't have the latest security release available since those are source only. Conda is also another solution which can be picked up by Visual Studio Code as available versions of Python making development easier. In the end it might be best to consider using WSL on Windows for installing a Linux version and using that instead.