No Python interpreter? this simple RAT installs its own copy (opens in new tab)

Shipping your own runtimes as part of heavy application isn't that unusual or limited to Python, especially in the Windows world.

For example, JetBrains ships its own Java runtime for all of its IDEs.

In fact, the Python world would be simplified if "ship your own runtime and env" as part of your final application was the norm. The Python runtime and stdlib by itself is like 20-30MB packaged up or something. For certain applications (especially media asset rich ones), that's not that significant.

> quite pesky

I've never had a bigger packaging nightmare than for Python and at this point I've worked with a substantial spread of available languages. It's simply embarrassing, especially because I used to like recommending it to people.

Also, when they ship a dosbox game, the installation includes not only dosbox, but a zip file of the dosbox source code.

...and strangely - I don't know if this is only the mac version - they randomly include the manual for a PC game called Harvester

  <game>/Extras/dosbox/dosbox_svn.zip
  ...
  <game>/Extras/Manual.pdf  <-- Harvester manual

I've done this before with pyinstaller, and it's pretty straightforward. This wasn't even for a customer-facing application, instead an internal utility that I had initially made to save myself time. The first time I tried to distribute it without bundling the interpreter and libraries, it took a full hour to get it mostly set up for 4 people. Sure, every problem from multiple conflicting python environments, to pip commands for using a firewall's proxy, to people not having used cmd before were all solvable problems. But at the end of the day, it was more straightforward to bundle it as a .exe, give people a file path, and tell them to double-click it.

GOG Galaxy 2.0 is also an Electron app, so it bundles the whole Chromium as well. The whole app is over 100 MB IIRC, but nobody cares since you'll be using it to download 100 GB games anyway.

(On a side note, I highly recommend it if you play games and have them on different PC platforms - Steam, Epic, GOG, UPlay... The plugin system is unique and fantastic.)

Blender includes Python for its extensions (add-ons).

And yes it can be a pain to deal with if you want to load binary modules.

https://docs.blender.org/api/current/info_overview.html

You can create binaries for python using https://www.pyinstaller.org/. I've used it well for Linux and mac. Haven't used it for Windows.

Pretty much every app that allows integrations in another language will bundle an interpreter. Maybe not on linux distros, but even there it can make sense due to version differences/bundled modules etc.

Sublime Text has it bundled too. I think that makes more sense than hoping that things work with whatever the system version of Python might be.

Wow, I had no idea Gog allowed that. Can you give examples of these extensions being put to good use?

that seems quite common in the gaming world. i've seen games packaged with tons of *.pyd files (the python dll equivalent for windows). Probably a large portion of the game logic was implemented in python

> Packaging Python apps for distribution outside of a Python development context is quite pesky.

It's actually pretty easy, as long as you skip on the various tools meant to make it an "easy one click process resulting in just one .exe" (pyinstaller, cx_Freeze, py2exe etc.).

For Linux things are a little bit different, but you're probably okay as long as you use a very old system to build it (RHEL6/7, manylinux1/2014).

I'm having a hard time deciding which DND alignment would fit that. Probably chaotic evil.