[uranusjr]

pg-native is a good example actually. Its readme lines out how you need to first get a compiler, libpq, and have some certain commands in your PATH. With psycopg2 (Python’s equivalent), the most common scenario is ‘pip install paycopg2-binary’ and you’re good to go.

[hot_gril]

So the difference is psycopg2-binary* bundles the libpq native code and pg-native doesn't? I'm no expert, but I think npm packages can include native code if they want thanks to node-gyp, only the node-libpq (which pg-native relies on) author seemingly decided not to package in libpq itself.

* Back when I used this, there was just psycopg2 which had the bin included.

[uranusjr]

Correct, but the challenges are to compile the dynamic library correctly so it runs on another machine, and on a given target machine choose to load a correct compiled artifact. Python has extremely good support for those compared to other similar ecosystems. The fact that most Python packages decide to do bundling on a comparably broard set of platforms, while packages on some other language are not, is a window to understand how the operation is made much easier by the ecosystem.