Introducing PyOxidizer, an open source utility for producing standalone Python applications, written in Rust

On Monday, Gregory Szorc, a Developer Productivity Engineer at Airbnb, introduced PyOxidizer, a Python application packaging and distribution tool written in Rust. This tool is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems.

Sharing his vision behind this tool, Szorc wrote in the announcement, “I want PyOxidizer to provide a Python application packaging and distribution experience that just works with a minimal cognitive effort from Python application maintainers.”

https://twitter.com/indygreg/status/1143187250743668736

PyOxidizer aims to solve complex packaging and distribution problems so that developers can put their efforts into building applications instead of juggling with build systems and packaging tools.

According to the GitHub README, “PyOxidizer is a collection of Rust crates that facilitate building libraries and binaries containing Python interpreters.” Its most visible component is the ‘pyoxidizer’ command line tool. With this tool, you can create new projects, add PyOxidizer to existing projects, produce binaries containing a Python interpreter, and various related functionality.

How PyOxidizer is different from other Python application packaging/distribution tools

PyOxidizer provides the following benefits over other Python application packaging/distribution tools:

It works across all popular platforms, unlike many other tools that only target Windows or macOS.

It works even if the executing system does not have Python installed.

It does not have special system requirements like SquashFS, container runtimes, etc.

Its startup performance is comparable to traditional Python execution.

It supports single file executables with minimal or none system dependencies.

Here are some of the features PyOxidizer comes with:

Generates a standalone single executable file

One of the most important features of PyOxidizer is that it can produce a single executable file that contains a fully-featured Python interpreter, its extensions, standard library, and your application's modules and resources. PyOxidizer embeds self-contained Python interpreters as a tool and software library by exposing its lower-level functionality.

Serves as a bridge between Rust and Python

The ‘Oxidizer’ part in PyOxidizer comes from Rust. Internally, it uses Rust to produce executables and manage the embedded Python interpreter and its operations. Along with solving the problem of packaging and distribution with Rust, PyOxidizer can also serve as a bridge between these two languages. This makes it possible to add a Python interpreter to any Rust project and vice versa.

With PyOxidizer, you can bootstrap a new Rust project that contains an embedded version of Python and your application. “Initially, your project is a few lines of Rust that instantiates a Python interpreter and runs Python code. Over time, the functionality could be (re)written in Rust and your previously Python-only project could leverage Rust and its diverse ecosystem,” explained Szorc.

The creator chose Rust for the run-time and build-time components because it is considered to be one of the superior systems programming languages and does not require considerable effort solving difficult problems like cross-compiling. He believes that implementing the embedding component in Rust also opens more opportunities to embed Python in Rust programs. “This is largely an unexplored area in the Python ecosystem and the author hopes that PyOxidizer plays a part in more people embedding Python in Rust,” he added.

PyOxidizer executables are faster to start and import

During the execution, binaries built with PyOxidizer does not have to do anything special like creating a temporary directory to run the Python interpreter. Everything is loaded directly from the memory without any explicit I/O operations. So, when a Python module is imported, its bytecode is loaded from a memory address in the executable using zero-copy. This results in making the executables produced by PyOxidizer faster to start and import.

PyOxidizer is still in its early stages. Yesterday’s initial release is good at producing executables embedding Python. However, not much has been implemented yet to solve the distribution part of the problem. Some of the missing features that we can expect to come in the future are an official build environment, support for C extensions, more robust packaging support, easy distribution, and more.

The creator encourages Python developers to try this tool and share feedback with him or file an issue on GitHub. You can also contribute to this project via Patreon or PayPal.

Many users are excited to try this tool:

https://twitter.com/kevindcon/status/1143750501592211456

https://twitter.com/acemarke/status/1143389113871040517

Read the announcement made by Szorc to know more in detail.

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