The reality is a bit different, the work on Python 3.6 was checked into the Cosmopolitan repo and I have been able to use it for production workloads that are in pure python. [0]
As Cosmopolitan Libc has evolved, it has been possible to compile more software without modifications, and that includes latest Python through a project called superconfigure[1].
Last person who tried to reproduce it from scratch did it last week (granted it too them a few days of solid work) but in the end they ended with a portable binary with Python 3.11.9, brotli, ssl and asyncio for their work related project.[2]
I find the use case where you have a system in production but could not possibly use the official Python for that system... unusual?
Double so since Python code (.py) is itself portable, and I would assume that the amount of work to make all the necessary extension be built into your APE vs just using the standard pip/pipenv/poetry/etc to be in favor of the latter.
Not even talking about the maintainability of the resulting system by other people who'd have to learn how to handle building an APE.
The use case was a client creating electrification plans based on structures from satellite data. We were able to get rid of gdal/pandas/networkx and several other dependencies and ended up with a fast python based process that could be given to clients for them to reproduce on their own machines (windows workstations).
In my use case, the niche is not having WSL/Docker available and letting end users repeat studies or re-run configuration scripts.
Python isn't built into Windows 10 by default and its easier for users to just run myape.exe than installing Python for Windows, pip install dependencies, etc.
As Cosmopolitan Libc has evolved, it has been possible to compile more software without modifications, and that includes latest Python through a project called superconfigure[1].
Last person who tried to reproduce it from scratch did it last week (granted it too them a few days of solid work) but in the end they ended with a portable binary with Python 3.11.9, brotli, ssl and asyncio for their work related project.[2]
[0] https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/tree/master/third_party... [1] https://github.com/ahgamut/superconfigure/ [2] https://github.com/croqaz/cpython/