The other issue with PyInstaller is that, by default, it includes all dynamic libraries that the Python interpreter has on your machine. It makes sense, it needs an interpreter and collects what is needed for it to run.
Unfortunately this might include libreadline.so, which is licensed under GPL, making your resulting executable unable to be under a proprietary license.
There are ways to solve this issue, but one has to search and read documentation (and code, in my case -- when I was researching it the docs were not clear).
> [PyInstaller] includes all dynamic libraries that the Python interpreter has on your machine.
Yes - and last time I used it, it created either a large folder or a compressed archive containing all of those libraries. Only the latter gives a truly standalone executable - but it's very slow to start up because it has to extract the archive to disk every time it runs.
It sounds like Nuitka has a solution for this problem, at least on Linux: "[the binary] will not even unpack itself, but instead loop back mount its contents as a filesystem".
Indeed it does. The only downside of this is that the resulting binary is (at least in my case) almost tripled in size compared to Pyinstaller (5MB vs 14.6MB). But I can live with that.
Still doesn't statically link C libraries (or at least I didn't find the setting for it), or other libraries for that matter.
Pyinstaller binary build depends only on: libdl.so.2, libz.so.1 and libc.so.6.
Nuitka binary build depends on: libdl.so.2, libz.so.1 and libc.so.6 AND libpthread.so.0 (for the loopback mounts I suppose).
The one that always creates problems is libc.so.6, which usually is not present 4 year old systems...
Unfortunately this might include libreadline.so, which is licensed under GPL, making your resulting executable unable to be under a proprietary license.
There are ways to solve this issue, but one has to search and read documentation (and code, in my case -- when I was researching it the docs were not clear).