eGenix announced this week that they were releasing an “open source, one file, no installation version of Python”. You can read their entire announcement in their press release here. If you want to check out the actual product, you can get it at the following URL: http://www.egenix.com/products/python/PyRun/.
This is a Unix-based Python and they state that they only provide Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X, as 32- and 64-bit versions, so if you’re a Windows guy, you’re out of luck. I think one of the coolest aspects of this tool is that it’s 11MB for Python 2 and 13MB for Python 3, but it still supports most Python applications and code that you’ve written. If you write a lot of code that depends on 3rd party utilities, than I don’t think PyRun will be very helpful to you. But if you depend mostly on Python’s standard library, than I can see this as a very handy tool.
An alternative to PyRun would be Portable Python which provides a large number of 3rd party libraries that are baked in with the standard library. I’ve used Portable Python in several applications of my own where I didn’t want to install Python itself. Anyway, I hope you find this information useful in your own endeavors.
Excellent for some embedded work!