[coldtea]

Quite easily. All offer options for building standalone programs that don't need a pre-installed runtime.

You just copy them to some directory, run them and they work.

And some of them even support building native binaries (e.g Java through gcc).

[tptacek]

Virtually nobody in practice uses any of these.† Java binaries are in practice JVM bytecode in classfiles. Python programs are run by the Python interpreter.

Go compiles to native code. Not only do you not need a preinstalled Go runtime on a target system, but there's very little advantage to even having one. The normal way of installing a Golang program is simply to copy the binary and run it. That's powerfully simpler than most other modern programming languages, with the obvious exception(s) of C/C++/ObjC.

† Commenter downthread says the same thing, but let me add that we look at other people's Python/Java/Ruby programs professionally, and I can't recall a single client ever doing anything like this.

[coldtea]

>Virtually nobody in practice uses any of these.† Java binaries are in practice JVM bytecode in classfiles. Python programs are run by the Python interpreter.

The "Virtually nobody" this is because the main use case for Python and Java are as server side languages (both) and scripting languages (Python). In those cases people are expected to have or to setup the appropriate runtime beforehand.

But for people who want to ship apps to end users (customers and consumers) with Java and Python, the bundling thing is very very common.

People using them in the end user space, regularly do it this exact way. For most of them, you don't even get to know what they use underneath.

Some examples:

- Dropbox (uses and bundles Python in the app).

- Vuze torrent client (previously Azureus and very popular in its prime) bundles a JRE (for when you don't have an installed one).

- LightTable is just a JS runtime bundled with Webkit as a standalone app.

[aphyr]

Huh. Most of the JVM shops I've worked at deploy apps as a monolithic fat .jar, built by their CI system, rather than trying to manage libraries on classpath.

[mh-]

I think GP comment was referring to the JVM 'runtime'. which, to me, is less of a complication than the Python scenario.

On that note, Python packaging/deployment/repeatability is still a disaster. If you have code with dependencies on compiled C extensions, there are few good ways to deal with this in prod.

In summary, I think a lot of us find the idea of monolithic binaries appealing (perhaps even to an irrational degree, speaking for myself) because of issues suffered in the past. :)

[lucian1900]

With the gigantic disadvantage of security updates requiring recompiling everything :(

[marshray]

I've never seen an organization that didn't do a full rebuild of every build product contained in each release anyway. Usually it's just faster and less error-prone to do a full rebuild than to recompile the minimal set of source files and relink.

[lucian1900]

If one uses dynamic linking, one can use (some) system-provided libraries, which will get security updates in the usual manner.

[marshray]

It looks like Go supports dynamic linking to "system" libraries. At least on MS Windows this https://code.google.com/p/go/codesearch#go/src/cmd/dist/wind... call to FormatMessageW http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms67... would be to an implementation in Kernel32.dll that would receive security updates.

On Linux there's a large gray area for things like libexpat.so.1 that may or may not be linked dynamically. But libc is LGPL, so I expect it too would be linked dynamically.

[tptacek]

Yeah, true, each time that happens, it'll be 450ms of your life you'll never get back.