With Mac Silicon coming out very soon..it’s even more important we start building Pants for more platforms than x86. One challenge is that we release Pants as a py36, py37, and py38 wheel. We already build 6 wheels, and any new platform means 3 more wheels. One solution is for us to switch to “rust embeds python” (https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues/7369). In the meantime, thoughts on requiring Py37 or Py38 to run Pants? Dropping Py36.

Hey @hundreds-father-404 here we’re already running everything with Py37 (could potentially migrate to Py38 if needed) and I don’t think that would be an issue.. we do have access to a python interpreter in our CIs, the agent that runs it is a specific agent with 3.7 installed.

Indeed, that’d be great to support Alpine, and other platforms like Raspberry Pi (arm)

Ha, you read my mind. I have a rpi laying around and would be nice to use it on it

I think requiring Python3.7 or 3.8 is fine

We must support 38 - dep inference would fail on Py38-only syntax otherwise 😕 It’d be nice to require Py38 to run, but I’m afraid too few of CI environments offer it still

Just out of curiosity, that issue that you mentioned about “rust embeds python”, would it open the possibility of

.pex

having python embedded ?

No, we would use PyOxidizer to distribute. It’s outside the scope for Pex to ever embed an interpreter, but there are some other binary formats that do that, like PyInstaller iirc. We would love for Pants to support more binary formats than Pex, setup.py dists, and AWS lambdas

oh cool, I guess that’d do the trick

Let us know if you’d be interested in adding support for another binary format, we’re happy to help with writing that. for example, a user has requested support for PyInstaller: https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues/10684