[dragonwriter]

Virtual environments are useful for isolating dependencies for different projects, not just isolating the interpreter.

(I mean, except on Windows, your venvs default to symlinking the interpreter and other shared bits, so you aren't really isolating the interpreter at all, just the dependencies.)

[ElectricalUnion]

AFAIK, it's the same even on POSIX, when you create a venv, "./bin/python" are symlinks and the pyvenv.cfg has a hardcoded absolute path of the current python interpreter the venv module was using at the time of creation. It really doesn't isolate the interpreter.

(also one of the reasons why, if you're invoking venv manually, you absolutely need to invoke it from the correct python as a module (`python3.13 -m venv`) to make sure you're actually picking the "correct python" for the venv)

[dragonwriter]

I meant that the symlink behavior is default except on Windows (though it may just be on POSIX platforms and I think of it as “except Windows” because I don't personally encounter Python on non-Windows non-POSIX platforms.)