[keymone]

> relatively rare in web development

not at all. from my previous experience with ruby i was using gems with compiled bindings to libraries for: mysql, memcached, json, xml, regexp and http. and probably some more i don't recall right now.

[toyg]

Python does all of that and more. There are still occasional issues with the thorniest setups, but binary wheels absolutely took care of the average case. You even get a massive desktop toolkit luke QT with a simple “pip install pyqt”.

Getting there might not be the nicest experience, but most packages nowadays can and do get there.