[antpls]

No mention of containers? I didn't write Python code since a while now, but it would have been nice to have a comparison with container technologies, which weren't available at the creation time of pypi and pip. Containers solve both the problems of the article : isolation and repeatability, for any language. Are virtual env tools still needed in the container era?

[bovermyer]

Containers would seem to solve the isolation part of the problem, but dependency management is not something containers can deal with effectively.

[antpls]

Big monolithic Python projects will face dependency issues for sure. However, softwares structured into simpler, smaller components, using the right languages for the right tasks, will probably have simpler dependencies for each modules.

That's what Go and tools like Bazel allows for : static builds, which forces to modularize the project into smaller independent components.

In case of static builds, the protocol between components is the C ABI, or an RPC protocol, but it could be a mesh of microservices too.

What is currently happening with the explosions of tools with Python is the result (take it with a grain of salt, only my opinion) of people only working with Python and not exploring enough outside of it

[aprdm]

Can you give practical examples of what you are mentioning? Like, how to achieve ""static builds"" with python? Got me interested!

[xapata]

Dropbox does this for their Windows client, I think.

[Bogdanp]

At least on non-Linux systems, containers are far more heavyweight than something like virtualenv.