some programs that require intensive computation would have compiled code for performance reason. scipy and numpy comes to mind. i also remember needing to compile stuff during a pip install for postgresql integration library.

Why do you need gcc to compile a Python program?

this is pretty common in interpreted languages/runtimes like Python, Node.js, Ruby, etc where a dependency is written in C or C++ or Rust or something else when the performance benefit is worth the cost of abandoning the primary language

the amusing/horrifying part is that Node.js actually depends on a Python script for this, so any Node.js application with a C/C++/Rust dependency actually needs Python installed somewhere

e.g. https://github.com/pyca/cryptography is a Python dependency that requires the Rust compiler/toolchain if pip / pipx / uv can’t find a pre-compiled version for your system

To me sounds like either a neglected project or designed to run in a docker image maybe? When was it updated last?

as far as i can tell, the project is alive and well, frequent and recent commits, and all the dependencies involved here are on their latest versions

In such cases its probably the best to run the application in a virtual machine.

and yeah, i know i can fix this with a VM or a Dockerfile and i’ll probably have to

but my point is that Python is kinda’ hot garbage for sharing code that depends on other shared code

it’s a terrific language by itself and sharing code that only depends on the standard library is perfectly fine, but as soon as we share code that depends on other third-party code we introduce inevitable suffering

To me sounds like either a neglected project

If it’s a depdency nested deep in the dependency graph, that doesn’t necessarily mean I abandoned my project. I might be using this dependency of a dependency in my project and don’t notice anything, if there is a precompiled version for the (Python/Linux/…) distribution I’m running on my machine, so I might not notice that. It might even be, that I keep my dependencies up to date, but someone up the chain isn’t. And maybe there isn’t really a viable alternative to that one dependency that pulls that package in.

There are plenty of python libraries which have compiled components, such as pandas, which is compiled on install via pip install. Some package managers have precompiled binaries, but you would need to make sure you have the right version for the project.

There’s a few LLM packages out there that need compiled code